TCI already carries the frequency, the mode, the meters and now the audio.
It also carries everything else about the radio — and OpsLog was logging
most of it once as '(unhandled once)' and throwing it away. The console is
mostly a place to put what was already arriving.
That makes it the cheapest panel here, and it is worth saying why. A K3
console costs a command and a reply for every value it shows, which is why
it reads its settings in a rotation and its meters only while on screen.
TCI PUSHES: the radio announces its drive, its filters, its noise blanker
and the rest on connect, and again whenever any of them changes —
including when the operator changes them in ExpertSDR3's own window, which
this panel therefore follows without asking anything.
What it drives: drive and tune drive, mic gain, TUNE, volume, mute,
squelch and its threshold, NB, NR, ANF, APF, AGC speed, the passband, RIT
and XIT with their offsets, and the VFO lock. The S-meter is a real dBm
reading, so its S units are arithmetic rather than the calibration guess a
K3's meter needs.
Setters never update the cached state. The radio answers with the new
value, and taking its word is what keeps the panel honest when a setting
is refused, clamped, or changed at the radio a second later — the one
exception being a slider mid-drag, held for 900 ms so it is not dragged
back by its own echo.
Capped width and centred, like the other consoles. Also offered as a
docked pane — and the Elecraft console is offered there too now: App has
always had that pane, Settings simply never listed it.
TWO FAULTS, ONE SYMPTOM — 'it refreshes ten times a second and the
buttons cannot be pressed'.
Preferences is a child of the main view, so every cluster spot, CAT push
and decode re-rendered the entire panel. On a busy evening that is
several times a second, and the panel is large enough that the rebuild
outlasts the gap between them: buttons missed their clicks because the
element under the pointer was replaced between the press and the release.
It is memoised now, and the callbacks App hands it hold their identity —
without that the memo compares unequal every time and buys nothing.
The dropdown menu was an absolutely-positioned child, so it was clipped
by whichever scrolling or overflow-hidden box it sat in: the satellite
list showed one entry of eight. It is portalled to the body now,
positioned from the field's rectangle, re-measured while open, and opens
upward when the field is near the bottom of the screen — which is exactly
where these fields tend to be.
SATELLITES: the field read the list once, when the details panel first
mounted — which is at startup. A list saved in Preferences afterwards
therefore did nothing until a restart. It comes from App now, which
already reloads the lists when Preferences close.
RDA COMPARE: a failed comparison wrote its error into the message beside
the FILL DISTRICTS button, a row above — the error appeared under a
button nobody had pressed while the one that had been pressed showed
nothing, which reads as 'the button does nothing'. It has its own message
now, and reports the two results that look like silence: no disagreement
at all, and no Russian contacts to compare. Both buttons say what they
are doing while they do it, and the comparison logs before it starts
reading — on a remote MySQL that read is seconds of quiet.
SAT_NAME is compared character for character by the awards and by LoTW:
AO-91 and AO91 are two different satellites to everything downstream, and
typing it afresh on every pass is how one of them ends up in a log. So
the station keeps its own list (Preferences → Lists → Satellites) and the
field offers it, alphabetically — while still accepting anything typed,
because a bird worked once and never added to the list must not be
impossible to log.
Not seeded with a shipped list of two dozen birds: an empty list means
this station does not work satellites, and filling the dropdown with
names nobody here has heard makes the field harder to use, not easier.
Also fixes the RDA district comparison: its conflict list was capped at
about six visible rows of a list holding up to two hundred, in a panel
that would not scroll to show the rest, and nothing in it could be acted
on. Taller, scrolling, and a callsign opens the contact.
The list is a ring buffer that held a thousand spots, and on a busy
evening a thousand arrive in a couple of minutes. So the buffer decided
how long a spot lived, and the spot LIFETIME setting never got the chance
to expire anything: fifteen minutes meant nothing when the oldest spot
was pushed out after two.
Now settable (Preferences → Cluster, beside the lifetime, since between
them they decide the same thing), 100 to 10 000. The ceiling is a real
limit rather than a round number: every spot is matched against the
worked index and the alert rules, and is a row the cluster grid and every
open band map re-render.
Reading the cluster means running down dozens of lines, and a single
click did the whole job — QSY, mode, callsign — so every line looked at
dragged the radio with it. One stray click while reading took the
operator off the station they were working.
Looking and going are two different intentions, so they are two gestures
now. The band map is unchanged: clicking a spot there is already a
deliberate act, not a way of reading a list.
Reported from a real FTDX101, and each one is a different kind of wrong.
MIC GAIN was read and written through the 0-255 scale the audio gains
use, but the CAT reference gives MG000-100. A rig set to 80 therefore
showed 38, and moving the slider sent 204 — outside the range the radio
accepts, so it refused the command and the slider sprang back. That
snap-back was the symptom; the scale was the cause.
POWER was capped at 100 W by the slider, not by the radio. There is no
CAT command for 'how much power can you make', so the ceiling comes from
the model name, with the rig believed if it ever reports more than the
table expects — it has just proved what it can do.
NAR is the narrow IF filter, and on a rig that does not implement NA the
button showed a state the radio never gave and did nothing when pressed,
which reads as a fault in the radio. Now shown only when the rig answers,
with a tooltip saying what it is.
Also: the frequency readout steps the Hz digits under the wheel, not just
the kHz ones. Zero-beating a CW signal is a few tens of Hz and it was the
one move the display would not make. And the split chaser is CW-only —
its marker comes from a CW skimmer.
An operator reading a cluster page sees 28500 and wants to be there. The
hands are on the callsign field; reaching for the frequency box, or the
mouse, is the part that loses the station. So the call field takes a bare
number on Enter: kHz for a frequency, or a band on its own.
Ambiguity resolves to the band on purpose -- 40 is 40 m, not 40 kHz --
because neither of those kHz values is anywhere a radio tunes, and it
reads the way an operator says it. Anything with a letter in it is a
callsign and behaves exactly as before; a number that is neither a band
nor a plausible frequency does nothing at all.
Bands go through the ordinary band change, so the antennas, the per-band
power table and the outbound integrations hear about it as they would
from the dropdown. Also adds 4 m to the QSY table, so a band that can now
be typed is a band that has a frequency to go to.
The Elecraft backend already existed; what was missing was somewhere to
operate the radio from. This adds the panel, on the Kenwood-dialect
client the K3 already speaks, in a tab of its own beside the Yaesu and
Icom consoles.
Scope is the six controls asked for and nothing else. Every extra command
added without a radio to test it against is a control that may or may not
do what its label says, and a K3 exposes dozens.
No K3 was available while writing this, so the two halves are treated
differently. The setters are the commands the reference documents
unambiguously and whose effect is visible and reversible (PC, AG,
TX/RX). The meters are the opposite: their scaling differs by model and
firmware, so the raw answers are logged next to the power setting, the
panel says the scaling is provisional, and an unmeasured SWR shows as
'—' rather than as a perfect 1.0 — a good match on an antenna nobody
measured is the reading that costs a radio.
ATU tune sends SWT20 (the K3 front-panel tap) and logs exactly what it
sent, so a wrong mapping names itself instead of leaving an operator
guessing which button OpsLog pressed.
Their agent protocol has no download verb, so the return path is a file
exported from their site. Running that file through the ordinary ADIF
import is the wrong tool and does real damage: it matches on callsign +
UTC minute + band + mode, their export is rebuilt from their own
database and rarely agrees to the minute, and 'update duplicates' then
inserts everything that failed to match -- several hundred copies of
contacts already in the log.
This path matches only. It stamps the confirmation on QSOs it finds,
falls back to the mode-CLASS key for the modes their export renames, and
REPORTS what it could not match instead of adding it: an unmatched
confirmation is a question about the log, not a contact to create.
Also logs and reports how many rows a delete actually removed -- silence
there made a delete that did nothing indistinguishable from one that
worked.
Same reasoning as the selected-rows export: ExportADIFFiltered was called
with includeAppFields=false, so a filtered export lost the award
references. A second entry, next to the standard one.
The right-click export always called ExportADIFSelected with
includeAppFields=false, so it wrote strictly standard ADIF. That is the
right default when the file is going to another logger, but it silently
drops every APP_ tag -- and an award reference such as RDA@KR-04 lives in
APP_OPSLOG_AWARDREFS and nowhere else. Backing up a selection, or moving
it to another OpsLog, lost the awards.
Adds a second entry rather than a flag on the first: the two exports
answer different questions, and a checkbox in a context menu would have
to be read before every export.
The upload targets in the QSO context menu gain HAMLOG.online, so a selection
goes there the same way it goes to QRZ or LoTW.
The confirmation toast now names the service from a map rather than a chain of
ternaries that stopped after three: hrdlog, eqsl and hamlog were echoed as their
internal ids, which is not what the operator clicked on.
HAMLOG.online is a seventh external service: one API key, one ADIF record per
QSO, immediate / delayed / on-close like the rest. They publish no API
documentation, so the protocol is read from THEIR OWN client — the HAMLOG Agent
(github.com/hamlogonline/Agent), which is the authoritative source short of
asking them:
POST https://hamlog.online/api/agent/
{"ADIFADD": {"APIKEY": k, "ADIFDATA": record}} → {"STATUS":"OK"}
{"KEYSTATUS": {"APIKEY": k}} → {"STATUS":"OK","CALLSIGN":…}
Success is STATUS == OK, not "no ERROR field": their failure carries ERROR and
no STATUS, and reading an unknown reply — a proxy page, a maintenance notice —
as an acceptance is how a contact goes missing without anyone noticing.
KEYSTATUS buys something no other service here offers: the key can be checked
BEFORE the first QSO, and the answer names the account. A key pasted from
another callsign is caught in the settings panel rather than through a week of
silent refusals.
Their confirmations are also an award source now, ticked like LoTW rather than
expressed through "custom". It reads the ADIF extras, not a column: the standard
names a field for hamlog.EU and none for hamlog.ONLINE, and borrowing the other
site's field would write a falsehood into every exported log. Three plausible
key names from their own export are accepted too, so nobody has to rename a
column by hand after an export.
Yaesu gains antenna selection (AN), remembered per band — the antenna picked on
a band comes back with it, with no table to fill in anywhere. Rigs with one
socket never answer AN and never show the row; the log says which case it is.
And a serial port that is refused now names its likely holder. OmniRig stays
resident once activated and keeps the port of the rig configured in it, so a
native backend never gets it — "Serial port busy" alone accused nobody, and an
FTDX10 spent a morning being blamed for it.
An Icom reached over the LAN streams its receive audio through the Icom
protocol, and Windows sees no sound card for it at all — the audio settings
could only offer the PC's own microphone, so "From radio" had nothing right to
point at and the QSO recorder had nothing to record. The recorder now accepts a
PUSHED source: the decoded stream goes to the speakers and to the recorder
alike, with no virtual cable to set up. Which source it uses follows the CAT
backend, and it is restarted only when that answer changes, so an ordinary
settings save never cuts a recording in half.
OmniRig no longer sends SetSimplexMode to a Yaesu when tuning. It is a silent
no-op on some — an FT-891 logged OK on every spot click while FreqA never
moved — and actively harmful on others. From an FT-2000 log, one QSY:
Vfo="AB"(0x80) Split=0x10000 (off) the operator's state
Vfo="BA"(0x100) Split=0x8000 (ON) after SetSimplexMode
The rig-agnostic "receive and transmit HERE, simplex" call turned split on and
moved reception to VFO B. OpsLog then displayed B — reading the radio correctly,
after having moved it itself. Icom is untouched: there the call is the
authoritative one and the direct write is unreliable.
Also:
- the NEW county badge shows in the entry form itself, inside the field,
where the operator is deciding whether to call.
- the basemap buttons clear the zoom controls; Light sat a few pixels from
the minus button and was being clicked by mistake.
- French cluster status: DÉJÀ CTC reads DÉJÀ QSO.
Panadapter spots are now worth reading. The comment carries the spotter, the
entity and the status in DXHunter's own shape — "CQ up 2 [F4BPO] [Franz Josef
Land] [New Slot]" — which needed two things nothing documents: SmartSDR splits
its command line on SPACES, so the words ran together until every space became
non-breaking; and it truncates past ~60 characters, so the cluster's own words
are trimmed first and the three brackets always survive. RBN column padding is
collapsed on the way in, or a preserved run of spaces opened a gap wide enough
to push the rest off screen.
"Already worked" means the CALLSIGN is in the log, not the entity: saying it of
a station never contacted was simply wrong. Each status can also be kept off the
panadapter entirely, and the WSJT-X decode spots obey the same switches — the
palette governs the panadapter, not one of the two things that feed it.
And the radio is no longer hammered: a spot whose frequency, colour and comment
are unchanged is not removed and redrawn. A busy skimmer feed re-spots the same
station every few seconds; one two-minute session sent 2128 adds, 88 of them for
a single callsign, and the display did not move a pixel for any of them.
CI-V, from an IC-7850 that kept killing JTDX: a reply the rig sent to another
controller on the same bus is no longer taken for ours, and a set_ptt, set_freq
or set_mode whose acknowledgement goes missing is verified by reading the rig
back instead of being reported as a failure. WSJT-X and JTDX answer a failed
command with a Rig Control Error and drop the link mid-over — 98 keyings, 6 lost
acknowledgements, 2 dropped connections in one session. The check waits 700 ms,
not the poll's 150: the rig has just failed to answer twice because it was
retuning, and a short probe would fail for the same reason.
Auto-call is withdrawn — it duplicated DXHunter, which already answers decodes,
and two programs deciding that from one shack key over each other. The library
is kept whole and dormant; a guard in App.tsx makes sure a stored preference
cannot key a transmitter whose switch no longer exists.
Also:
- the log rotates while running, not only at startup: the CI-V trace left on
wrote 416 MB and nothing would have stopped it before the disk did. Closing
it now releases the crash file too — the runtime keeps its own duplicate.
- the interface zoom announces itself, with a badge, a click back to 100% and
a View menu; Ctrl+wheel and Ctrl+0 always worked and nothing said so.
- no more elastic bounce, and no swipe-to-navigate out of the app.
- Edit QSO: your own TX power and the contacted station's extended locator
were saved and written back with no box to set them.
- FT decodes: continents are a multiple choice; a compound MSHV message that
answers two stations in one line is recognised as addressed to you.
Ultrabeam on a serial port never worked, and three faults were stacked so
each hid the next:
- Stop() did not wait for the poll loop, so a stopped client kept the COM
port. Every later client then failed with "Serial port busy" — the
program holding it being OpsLog itself.
- startUltrabeam tore the old client down CONCURRENTLY with starting the
new one, and "Test connection" built a second client on a port already
ours. Harmless over TCP, fatal on a port with one owner.
- A silent serial port returns (0, nil) and bufio retries that a hundred
times: a 4 s timeout became ~7 minutes of a frozen poll loop logging
nothing.
The controller then answered at once. Confirmed on hardware: the USB cable
presents TWO COM ports, only the second reaches the controller, and only at
19200 baud — so the speed is pinned in code (an FTDI cable opens at any
speed, and a wrong one is indistinguishable from a dead controller) and the
port field says which one to pick. The first exchange after each connect is
hex-dumped, which separates silence from a wrong baud from a misread frame.
Databases now carry only the tables their role needs. Every target used to
get the whole migration set, so a shared MySQL logbook grew settings and
station_profiles tables nothing ever wrote to — an operator inspecting the
server could not tell which copy was authoritative. Statements are filtered
by role, unknown tables are kept in both (fail-safe), and existing databases
are cleaned once, dropping only EMPTY tables. Settings → Database gains a
Compact button, since SQLite frees pages inside the file and never shrinks it.
Also:
- Awards: the callsigns behind a cell open the QSL Manager on Paper QSL,
searched, ready for the card dates.
- The record button no longer goes missing after an update: whether manual
recording is possible is a per-profile question that was asked once, at
startup, before the profile was known.
- Alert rules and filter presets confirm that they were saved.
- Spot clicks on the radio panadapter carry the POTA park into F3.
- The build gate is re-checked wherever the active callsign can change; it
ran at startup alone, and a fresh install has no callsign then.
Three faults an operator's log finally made visible, plus the interface
work that came out of the same session.
Reliability:
- UDP events were dropped on backpressure without a word. A period hands
over twenty-odd decodes at once, and one slow write to the radio was
enough to fill the queue — so a decode simply never appeared, and the
only detector was the operator comparing the panel with JTDX. The drop
is now counted and logged, panadapter spots went to their own goroutine
so the radio can no longer hold the decode stream up, and the queue is
deep enough for a full period.
- The CAT manager waited for its poll loop with a bare <-done. A loop
wedged in a serial read then blocked every later restart inside Start,
before it could even try to connect: the rig stayed dead, no line was
written anywhere, and only killing the process recovered it. The wait
is bounded at ten seconds and says what it abandoned and why the next
connect may fail.
- Shutdown had no logging at all, so a hang left nothing to go on and a
process the operator had to kill — which then blocked the restart after
an update. Every step is logged, and a watchdog forces the exit if one
of them never returns.
Auto-call:
- A QSO in progress is now held by OpsLog itself rather than inferred
from the sender's Status. The moment WSJT-X/JTDX dropped the DX call or
the Enable-Tx flag between overs, the exchange looked finished and the
next CQ was answered, interleaving two and then three QSOs on one
slice. Released on log, on halt, on taking over, and by a watchdog.
Cluster console:
- Replies to a command were buried under the spot flood; a Replies
toggle hides the DX spots, which the list above already shows.
- Twelve named command buttons beside the input, configured in
Settings -> Cluster; a button with no command is not drawn.
- Following the tail is now an explicit switch, and sending a command
re-arms it. It used to measure "am I at the bottom" AFTER committing
the new lines, so a ten-line reply looked like the operator had
scrolled up and was never followed — the one case it exists for.
Awards:
- An award can name NO field. The matching controls disappear with it
and only hand-assigned references count, which is the only thing that
can feed a reference like WWBOTA. A test pins that nothing else is
scanned.
- WWBOTA added to the catalogue with its 31 342 references.
Elsewhere: the rotor widget's Stop button acknowledges the press like
the direction presets already did, and the docked band map can be
switched to fit-to-band from its own header.
It joins the left/right dropdowns in Settings -> General alongside the maps,
the cluster and the rest, so decodes can sit beside the entry strip instead
of only behind a tab. Per-profile like the other pane choices.
The panel itself is now built in ONE place and rendered from both: two
copies of that call would be two sets of props to keep in step, and the
click handler in particular is not something to duplicate.
The status refresh follows. Its "is anything showing a spot status?" test
decides whether a logged QSO refreshes the NEW badges now or only marks
them dirty, and a panel that had become a pane would have gone on wearing
stale badges whenever it was shown that way rather than as a tab.
EY35S went on showing NEW SLOT for the rest of the half hour it stayed in
the list, five minutes after the QSO was in the log.
A decode's verdict is resolved once, when it arrives, and then read from
the shared status cache for ever. The cache IS refreshed after a QSO is
logged - but refreshSpotStatuses only ever re-queried the cluster spots, so
no decoded callsign was in the batch. And the decodes tab was not in the
"is anything showing a status?" test, so logging a QSO while looking at
this very panel only marked the cache dirty and waited for the cluster or
the band map to be opened.
Both fixed: decoded stations join the refresh batch, deduplicated by
call+band+mode so half an hour of a busy band is a few hundred queries the
backend answers with one pass of the log, and the tab counts as visible.
Second, worse bug found on the way. The cache is pruned back to the live
spots once it outgrows twice the spot cap - keeping only keys present in
the cluster list. Decodes share that cache and are exactly what pushes it
past the cap, so on a busy band the panel would have wiped every one of its
own badges the moment it filled up. Decoded stations now count as live.
Clicking a decode now ANSWERS it. It sends WSJT-X/MSHV a Reply message
(type 4), which is the same thing as double-clicking the line in their own
Band Activity window: the application looks the decode up, sets its
transmit frequency to the caller's and starts the exchange.
It deliberately does not tune the radio, which is what it did before and
why nothing happened. On FT8 the whole band sits inside one passband, so
moving the dial changes nothing about who gets answered - the decision
belongs to the decoding application, and the Reply is the only way to hand
it over. Tuning would also just fight it for the VFO. The entry is still
filled so the QSO can be logged here.
The reply is routed by PROGRAM ID, not by listener: two receivers can share
one multicast group, and answering a station heard on the 6 m instance by
talking to the 20 m one would start a call on the wrong band. It goes to
the address that instance's packets actually arrive from - a multicast
listener must answer the sender, never the group. WSJT-X matches the reply
against its own decode list, so the payload replays the decode field for
field: time, snr, delta time, audio offset, mode and message text.
Two columns added, DT and Freq - the audio offset inside the passband, not
the RF frequency, which is the same for every station in the list and says
nothing. Past about two seconds DT takes a warning tint: that station is
drifting out of the window.
The transmit strip. "You cannot see what you are sending, or who you are
calling" - two separate faults. The message was only ever threaded into its
period, and in FT8 you transmit in the slots you are NOT receiving in, so
its period had no decodes and the whole line was dropped; a transmit slot
now creates its period. And the state is a strip of its own at the top,
because it is the one thing on the screen that is about the operator rather
than the band. It is fed by every Status rather than only by one carrying
transmit text, so it can still name the station being called on MSHV and
older JTDX builds, which stop before tx_message in the Status payload.
"New only" became per-category badges, in the colours and the vocabulary of
the Chase New panel. None lit shows the whole band - this is a decode log
first, and a panel that opened by hiding most of the traffic would be lying
about what is on the air.
Every FTx decode WSJT-X, JTDX or MSHV puts on the wire, grouped by T/R
period. Optional and closable, from Tools -> FT decodes; its open state is
remembered, because an operator running digital modes leaves it open for
the session rather than consulting and closing it.
The period is the point, and what separates this from the cluster list.
FT8 is a sequence of fifteen-second slots and a band is read by watching
them go by: who called CQ this slot, who answered, what I was sending while
they did. A flat list sorted by time loses exactly that, so the list is
grouped one section per period, newest first, with the operator's own
transmission shown inside the slot it went out in.
Three fields had to be carried up from the wire to make it possible:
- the decode's OWN timestamp, which the parser read and threw away. It is
what assigns a slot: a period's decodes arrive in one burst a second or
two after it closes, so arrival time piles a whole period into the next
one. Rebuilt to UTC from milliseconds-since-midnight, with the
day-boundary case handled - a decode stamped 23:59:58 arriving at
00:00:01 would otherwise be dated a day ahead and sit at the top of the
list for the rest of the session.
- the decoded line itself. The exchange is what says where a station is in
a QSO, and no set of extracted fields reads like "R-09" does.
- tx_message and transmitting from Status, which nothing parsed before.
Recorded once per message rather than on every Status, which repeats it
about once a second for the whole over.
Also picked up on the way: is_new, low_confidence, off_air, the operator's
own call and grid, and the T/R period itself - better authority on slot
length than the mode name, which says nothing about a custom period. The
Status tail is read defensively: those fields were appended over successive
schema versions and JTDX and MSHV each stop at their own point, so a short
packet is normal and keeps whatever parsed.
Status flags come from ClusterSpotStatuses, the resolver the cluster list
and band map already use, filling the same cache. One verdict per call:
"new band" in this panel and plain worked in the cluster two seconds later
would be worse than no flag at all. Clicking a call goes through the same
handler as a cluster spot, so answering a station is one gesture whether it
came off telnet or off the receiver.
Filters: CQ only, new-anything only, band, mode, continent, an SNR floor
and a free search. The band, mode and continent choices are built from what
is actually on the feed - offering 160 m to a station whose receivers are
all on 6 m is noise.
Decodes are held in the frontend and pruned to a rolling half hour: they
are a live view, not data, nothing outside the panel reads them, and a
night of FT8 on 20 m would otherwise grow a list no filter can rescue.
Arrivals are staged on a 300 ms timer so a period landing as fifty packets
costs one status lookup and one render.
The PH/CW/DIG grid in the Stats panel is the fastest read in the app and its
palette was fixed per theme. Settings -> Appearance now offers the six: the
four status fills, the never-worked fill, and the ring on the cell being
entered.
Stored as OVERRIDES, not as a palette. Each of the twelve themes ships an
--mx-* ramp tuned to its own background, so an operator who only wants a
different green must not thereby freeze the other four to the theme they
happened to be using that day. An empty value means "whatever the theme
says"; the chosen ones are stamped inline on <html>, where they win over
every theme; switching the feature off hands the colours straight back.
The pickers are seeded from what the matrix is painting at that moment
rather than from a fixed palette, so the choice starts from the colours in
front of the operator. A new --mx-cur token carries the current-entry ring:
it follows --warning by default, so it stays theme-correct on all twelve,
but can be recoloured without dragging every other warning in the app along.
The legend under the matrix and its cell tooltips were hardcoded English.
They now go through t() with the same keys as the pickers, so the grid and
the settings cannot disagree about which green is which.
withIOTARef was applied inside fillFromLastQso, the backfill that runs when the
provider came up short. That function returns early when there is no previous
contact with the callsign — so the island reference appeared for stations
already worked and never for the new one calling from the island, which is the
entire point of reading QRZ's <iota>.
Moved to the provider result in runLookup, where the rest of the callbook fields
are applied. The precedence is unchanged: a reference the operator typed or
picked still wins over the callbook.
Reported on F5IRH, Le Palais, Belle-Île-en-Mer — EU-048 in the QRZ record, and
nothing on the IOTA award.
No changelog line: the feature has not shipped yet, so the entry already in the
0.25.7 block now describes what it does.
QRZ's XML carries <iota>EU-048</iota> for an operator on an island, and OpsLog
read past it. Wired end to end: the provider, the lookup cache (a column, like
web and zip before it), and the entry's award references.
It matters more here than the same field would for another award. There is no
live "who is on an island right now" feed anywhere — POTA has one and that is
what OpsLog matches spots against; SOTA has one behind conditions; IOTA
publishes only static lists. So the callbook record is the practical source, and
it is known BEFORE the contact is logged, which is when a reference is useful.
The reference goes in as an IOTA award reference, exactly as one picked by hand,
so the existing path carries it to the qso.iota column on save.
Two limits, both deliberate. A reference the operator typed or picked WINS: a
callbook entry can be years out of date, and the operator in front of the radio
has just been told where the station is. And the value must look like an IOTA
reference — two letters, a hyphen, three digits — because writing anything else
into the award makes a reference no list contains, which counts for nothing and
has to be found by hand later.
Two faults behind one screenshot: 3Y0K, recorded in the log as Bouvet Island,
showing the Antarctica matrix.
SELECTING A QSO now shows what that QSO records. The panel asked WorkedBefore
with no DXCC hint, and a hint of zero makes the backend resolve the entity from
cty.dat and the ClubLog exceptions AS THEY ARE TODAY — right for a live contact,
wrong for one being looked at in the log. The repo's own "infer from past QSOs"
path never ran, because the hint was no longer zero by the time it got there.
Hence Antarctica, and "5 QSOs with this entity" against "11 with this call":
two different entities, one of them nobody had asked about. The selected row's
dxcc now travels with it and is passed as the hint.
Browsing the log shows what the log says, even where the log is wrong.
Correcting an entity stays a deliberate act — right-click, Update from ClubLog.
BACK-ENTERING A QSO now resolves the exception at the CONTACT'S date. An
exception carries a validity window and a DXpedition's window closes: 3Y0K typed
months later, with the activation's own date in the form, was resolved against
today, matched nothing, and fell back to cty.dat. Both callers pass the date
they already hold — the entry strip's, and in the editor the record's own.
The date is trusted to move the resolution BACKWARDS only. A half-typed
"2026-0" must not send the lookup to the year 20, and a mistyped future date
must not resolve against a window that has not opened; both fall back to now.
Midday rather than midnight, because a window given in whole days is inclusive
of its end date and 00:00 sits exactly on the boundary.
Asked whether the faster poll applies to all the rotator backends. It does —
GetRotatorHeading is one binding over PstRotator, Rotator Genius, GS-232/ARCO,
DCU-1 and SPID alike, and it reads only the ACTIVE rotor, so two towers do not
double it. But counting what that costs turned up two things worth fixing.
Every backend builds a fresh client per call — spid.New, gs232.NewSerial,
dcu1.NewSerial, rotgenius.New — so one poll is one OPEN and CLOSE of a serial
port or a TCP connection, not a read on a link already up. And the status bar
and the Station Control compass each ran their own interval against that same
binding, so with the tab open the controller was asked twice over. At the 700 ms
I had just set, that was nearly three port opens a second on a 600-baud line.
Both now share one loop, and it adapts: 500 ms while the position is changing,
3 s once it has been still for six seconds. These controllers do not report
"moving" — a SPID answers a position and nothing else — so it is inferred from
the position itself, and held briefly after the last change so the tail of a
movement stays smooth. Commanding a move, a stop, or switching rotor polls at
once, so the needle starts sweeping on the click.
A slow controller cannot stack requests behind itself either: at 600 baud a SPID
reply takes a fifth of a second on the wire alone, and a port still open from
the last poll cannot be opened again.
Field report from a tower: on a RAK/RAU in Rot1Prog, every commanded heading
made the antenna want to turn nearly a full circle ANTICLOCKWISE — 0°, 90°, any
of them — while the heading readout, the stop button and everything else worked.
BuildSet framed the four-digit Rot2Prog azimuth for both dialects. A Rot1Prog
reads three: its replies are three digits in a five-byte frame, and its command
field matches. So 90° went out as "0450" and was read as 045 — 45 − 360 = −315°.
Every target landed 360° low, which is why it was always anticlockwise and
always nearly a full turn. The operator's own guess, that OpsLog was in 720°
mode, was the right instinct in the wrong place: the fault is a decimal shift,
not a range.
The round-trip test added here is the one that would have caught it without a
tower — every degree of the circle through the command builder and back through
the reply parser, which must return the degree that went in. The frame tests
pinned the Rot2Prog form against the reference and said nothing about the other
dialect.
Two more from the same report. A rotator test that only READS the heading — SPID,
ARCO, DCU-1 — said "Packet sent, the antenna should swing to north, check
PstRotator's UDP listener", naming a program not in the path for a move never
commanded; it now says the controller answered and nothing was moved. And the
compass polled every three seconds, so a turning antenna moved the needle in
steps of about thirteen degrees; the heading now has its own 700 ms tick while
the relay boards and the antenna controller stay at three seconds.
Relay automatic control and the band-change outbound rows both hang off the rig
state, which is right when there IS a rig: changing Band in the entry strip
pushes a QSY, the new state comes back through the CAT callback, and the relays
follow from there — which is why this works for anyone with rig control.
Without a CAT connection nothing is pushed and nothing comes back, so a station
whose rig OpsLog does not control changed band and the antenna switch sat
exactly where it was. Reported as automatic control not working; it was never
told the band had changed.
The entry selector now says so itself, but only when the CAT push did not
happen, and never when the band or frequency lock is on: a lock means the entry
is deliberately decoupled from the rig, and moving an antenna to match a contact
logged from last year is worse than doing nothing.
The frequency is passed as unknown on that path — a band selector gives a band
and nothing else, and rules written on a frequency RANGE are left alone rather
than evaluated against a made-up dial reading.
The de-duplication of "is this a new band" is now shared by both sources, so a
station that has both does not command its switch twice for one QSY.
Also: the same credit line as the QSL e-mail now closes the default recording
e-mail body, on the same terms — a default in the template, so a stored one is
untouched.
Reported as delayed auto-upload breaking Recent QSOs. It does not — the grid was
waiting on the upload for its news.
Nothing reloaded the list on qso:logged. The entry form calls refresh() itself
after AddQSO, so a QSO TYPED in OpsLog always appeared; a QSO logged from
anywhere else — WSJT-X or MSHV over UDP, JTAlert, NET Control, an offline replay
— reached the grid only when something else reloaded it, and the something else
was extsvc:uploaded. With auto-upload set to immediate that arrives a second
later and hides the gap completely.
Set a service to delayed and the QSO appeared one to two minutes late; set it to
upload on close and not until the next launch. So the very thing deferring an
upload exists for — correcting a contact before it goes out — was impossible,
because there was nothing on screen to correct.
The list now follows the log, on the same debounced path the upload events
already use: qso:logged fires twice per contact (insert, then award refs) and a
contest run fires it every few seconds.
The automatic pass fills a blank county only, and deliberately: a value the
operator or QRZ supplied usually beats one derived from a ZIP code. That leaves
no way at all to correct a county already stored — and the Connecticut planning
regions are exactly that case. Every CT contact logged before that correction
holds a county the state abolished in 2022, and filling blanks never reaches
one of them.
So the new entry OVERWRITES, because it is asked for by hand on a chosen set of
rows precisely because the stored value is believed wrong. Only US entities are
touched, only callsigns the database holds, and only when the answer actually
differs — so re-running it on a mixed selection is safe and the count reported
is the number of counties that really changed. Award refs are re-materialised:
the county IS the reference for CQ USA-CA and the state for WAS.
The entry appears only once the database has been downloaded, and appears
without a restart when one finishes — an action that can only ever answer "no
database" is not worth a line in a menu this long.
They were made session-only on a misreading: the ask was about the FIRST launch
of a fresh install, not every launch. Restored as they were — restored on
reopen, and travelling with a copied data/ folder.
A first-ever launch already starts with nothing filtered: every selection
defaults to empty or off and there is no code that switches one on. The one
route by which a new installation can come up filtered is a copied data/ folder,
which carries the previous machine's selections by design.
The filtered-out message and the clear-every-filter button stay: they are what
makes a filter that IS set visible, whenever it was set.
buildDeviceDriver had no case for "httpgen", so the generic board fell through
to the WebSwitch driver: it polled an address it had never been given, reported
itself offline, greyed out every relay button, and sent none of the configured
URLs. Nothing in the interface said so — the board was configured, saved and
listed, and simply did nothing. deviceKey did not cover the URLs either, so once
that is fixed, correcting a typo in one would still have handed back the cached
driver holding the old address until a restart.
Two shapes of home-made switch could not be described at all:
- a bit-mask board whose four URLs differ by one character
(/Set0/1, /Set0/2, /Set0/4, /Set0/8) — {value} in the pattern now takes the
number from the per-relay box, keeping the address in one place;
- a board numbering its channels from zero — {relay-1}, since giving up the
pattern for eight hand-typed URLs was the only alternative.
The pattern decides what the per-relay boxes hold, and the grid says which as
soon as {value} is typed: guessing per box ("does this look like a URL?") would
change meaning on a typo, which is not a thing to do to something wired to an
antenna. A URL typed without a scheme gets http:// like the named boards get
from relayBase; https:// is passed through untouched.
Host and the connection test are gone for this type. It has no address of its
own — its relays may each live on a different box — and no status to read, so a
test could only ever answer "OK, 4 relays". Save was greyed out without a host,
which made a complete configuration of four full URLs impossible to store.
Cluster filters no longer persist across launches. A band lock set weeks earlier
is invisible to whoever set it: the counter reads 76 spots live, the grid is
empty, and the search goes to the cluster instead. Nobody loses work by
re-ticking a chip. Grouping and the panel state still persist — they change how
spots look, never whether they appear.
An operator sent two screenshots: 76 LIVE in the counter, and the panel beside
it reading "Waiting for spots… Spots will appear as the cluster sends them."
Both his band and mode were locked to the rig — 20 m, SSB — so the filters were
doing exactly their job and the empty state was describing a different problem
entirely. He went looking for a connection fault.
It now says how many arrived, names every filter currently narrowing the list,
and offers one button to clear them all. The band and mode locks are named
first: they follow the rig rather than a click, so they are the two nobody
remembers switching on.
Also times the connection. He reports the first launch taking a while to
produce spots and a restart connecting instantly, which is the signature of a
slow name resolution rather than a slow node — the OS caches the answer, so the
second run skips it. The log now carries the dial duration and the delay to the
first spot, which separates that from a node that simply had nothing to say.
Hypothesis, not conclusion: the next log settles it.
The hard-coded emitters each speak one published format at one fixed moment.
This is the escape hatch, and it exists mainly for antenna switches: they are
driven by a URL, and the band change is the trigger they want.
Four triggers, each carrying its own field set: band change (the RADIO's band,
not the entry form — a switch follows the rig, not what is being typed), QSO
logged, rotator command and callsign lookup. The panel prints the fields the
selected trigger can fill, which is the point of the whole thing: a placeholder
the trigger does not carry renders as nothing, and without the list an operator
writes {freq} on a band change and has no way to learn why the switch never
moved.
Three things the panel cannot show, handled here:
- Escaping. A URL needs every value percent-encoded; a UDP payload must not
be touched. The first portable callsign, F4BPO/P, puts a path separator in
the middle of a query string otherwise — it works on the bench and fails on
the air.
- Blocking. An HTTP call to a switch that is unplugged would otherwise sit
for the operating system's timeout, on the path of a band change. It runs
in the background with a 3 s limit.
- Silence. A switch answering 404 after a firmware update fails exactly like
success looks from here, so the status code is logged, throttled per row.
The rotator trigger hooks the COMMAND rather than the SP/LP buttons, so the
compass and a spot click fire it too, and the path ("SP"/"LP") is passed
through because an azimuth alone cannot say which was taken — 137° is short
path to one station and long to another.
Credentials in a URL are stored as typed. That is the operator's call, on the
grounds that this is LAN gear, and the hint in the panel says so.
An operator waited over a minute and the button never appeared; opening
Settings and pressing Cancel made it appear at once. That is the whole
diagnosis — Cancel was the only thing that re-read the option.
GetChaseNew returned the cached atomic, which exists for the MQTT goroutine
and is false until startup has read the setting. The UI asked while the
database was still opening, was told "off", believed it, and never asked
again. It now reads the setting, like the grid-chasing binding beside it.
The frontend asks again at the two moments this class of race resolves: when
GetStartupStatus returns, and when the first logbook load succeeds — the seam
that already re-reads the connection label for exactly this reason, with a
comment saying so.
The open/closed state was already remembered per machine; it is now in
PORTABLE_KEYS with the other widget toggles, so it travels with data/ like the
rotor and amplifier panels rather than being the one that does not.
Four things from an operator's first look at the panel, and one of them was
mine.
The frequency column showed "—" on every row. pskr.Spot.FreqHz was declared
and documented in one edit and never assigned in the next, so the payload's
"f" was parsed and dropped. A click therefore filled the callsign and left
the rig where it was, which is half the point of the panel. Assigned, with a
test that runs a real payload through and checks the value survives into the
Spot — the field being declared is what made it look done.
A row now carries ONE indication instead of stacking them. A station can be a
new band and a new prefix at once; the row says the first that matters, in the
order that would make an operator leave what they are doing: entity, band,
mode, slot, then prefix, then square. Two badges on one line made the list
unreadable at a glance, which is the only thing it is for.
Each category has a filter chip in the header, in its own colour, remembered
across sessions. A toolbar button shows the panel and a cross closes it — the
same split the Super Check Partial panel uses, where the setting decides
whether the feature exists and the button whether it is on screen.
The panel is wider and the country column gets what is left, which is more
than it was now that a row carries one badge.
PSK Reporter tells you what is actually being decoded in your region, which
is a larger set than what somebody chose to spot: nobody spots the FT8 caller
running ten watts from a rare square.
Almost all of it existed. The MQTT payload already carries frequency, mode,
transmitter and both grids; the watcher already drops any report collected
further than NearKm from the operator, which is exactly the question worth
asking — the station is being heard HERE, not in Japan; and with grid chasing
on the subscription is already every band, filtered at the broker by receiver
square, measured at 0.2 to 1.2 messages a second. This reads messages that
were arriving and being discarded.
"New" is not decided here. Every spot goes through ClusterSpotStatuses, the
same function the DX cluster grid uses and the same cached index, so the two
panels cannot drift apart the way the county columns did. Cost per message is
map lookups behind an option cached in an atomic, because the MQTT goroutine
must never wait on the settings store.
The option is its own, not nested under grid chasing: chasing squares and
chasing entities are different wants, and the feed now has three consumers,
any one of which brings it up and none of which cuts the others loose when it
goes down.
The panel says "digital modes only" in its footer. An empty list has to mean
"nothing new on FT8/FT4/JS8 near you", not "the band is dead" — it will never
show a new entity on CW.
The comment came out "SSB WAC EU WAZ 15 WPX HA5" — the QSO's materialised
award_refs hold both kinds, and I took them all. Those four are what every
reader of the spot derives from the callsign in their head. They spent the
whole 30-character comment saying nothing and buried SOTA HA/KM-018, the one
reference anyone would have acted on.
Computed awards are now filtered out with the same rule the QSO editor uses
(isComputedAwardField), which is why they are the ones it lists on the left
and not in its read-only panel. The field map moves from a ref to state as
well: a ref left the first spot of a session computing before GetAwardDefs
had answered.
Also opens 0.25.2, since 0.25.1 shipped before the spot work, and sets the
default mode list to SSB, CW, FT8, FT4, FT2, RTTY, PSK31, FM. AM and
DIGITALVOICE stay in the catalogue but are no longer selected on a fresh
install. FT2 joins the digital family everywhere its siblings are listed —
report list, RST defaults, Flex power class — so it gets dB reports rather
than the 59 an unknown mode falls back to.
After the mode, which is the order a cluster line is read in:
"CW POTA FR-11553".
Two sources, because the QSO can be at either stage. While it is being typed
the entry panel holds the references as "CODE@REF;CODE@REF"; once logged they
live on the row as the materialised award_refs. The Send Spot window takes the
entry's when there are any and falls back to the last logged QSO — the same
fallback the callsign and frequency defaults already use — and picking a QSO
from the Latest list fills in that QSO's own.
A self-spot is the opposite case and gets its own builder: it announces OUR
station, so it carries MY_POTA_REF and friends. Using the QSO's award
references there would spot us with the park number of the station we just
worked, announcing us from somewhere we are not.
Both cap at the 30 characters a cluster node keeps, and add a reference whole
or not at all — a truncated park number is worse than none, since nobody can
act on it, and it still costs everyone who reads the spot. Only the comment we
BUILD is held to that; what the operator types is their own business.
QSL_VIA is the manager. QSL_SENT_VIA and QSL_RCVD_VIA are the ADIF "QSL Via"
enumeration — B bureau, D direct, E electronic, M manager (import-only) —
and say how a card travelled. OpsLog had one column for all three:
- the import folded QSL_SENT_VIA into QSL_VIA whenever QSL_VIA was empty,
which is exactly a Log4OM export (it defaults QSL_SENT_VIA to E), so
OE6CLD saw "E" everywhere OpsLog shows the manager;
- QSL_RCVD_VIA was listed in adifPromoted with no column behind it, so it
was not stored, not kept among the extras, and not exported — dropped
outright on import;
- neither was ever written on export, so an import followed by an export
destroyed both;
- and OpsLog polluted the field itself: the QSL Manager panel wrote
"Bureau" / "Direct" / "Electronic", in full words, into QSL_VIA.
Two columns added (migration 0027), carried through the five places a
promoted ADIF field has to touch, with round-trip tests pinning the reported
case. The QSL panel now offers Bureau / Direct / Electronic for each
direction and stores the enumeration; the manager field is labelled as the
manager and holds only that. M is kept when a file gives it and never
written back out.
Existing logs hold a mixture of the two in one column. The repair is offered,
not performed: the count is shown once per log with a plain question, and a
"no" is remembered. It moves only where QSL_SENT_VIA is still empty, and only
values that normalise to the enumeration — a manager is a callsign and can
never be one of those six words, which a test pins against real manager calls.
compactH was 158px, "tuned so the compact entry strip fits in a single row".
A constant tuned against a layout stops being true the moment the layout
changes, and this one outlived a strip that had since shrunk — leaving about
70px of empty window under the fields.
The frontend now measures what it rendered and asks for that height, watched by
a ResizeObserver so a strip that wraps at a narrow width is followed too. The
topbar is added as its declared h-8 rather than measured, since it is fixed.
Bounded in the backend: a measurement of zero — a layout not yet painted —
must not collapse the window, and the call is ignored unless compact is on so
nothing can shrink the normal window. Rounded to whole pixels so a sub-pixel
reflow cannot start a resize loop.
The same answer the Details tab already gave, moved to where the county is now
typed — a badge in a tab nobody has open while working a station is a badge
that does not do its job.
Debounced at 300 ms and keyed on state + county together: the field is typed
into as well as filled by the lookup, and the check queries the log. A county
name means nothing without its state, so both have to settle before asking.
The looked-up values now sit directly under the geography line they continue —
QTH, State, locator, then county and zones — and the free-text fields close the
block. Reading order follows what the lookup fills, rather than interleaving it
with what the operator types.
rouggy