Adding it to the device lists put it in all four dropdowns, and an
operator picked it as their RECORDING MIC — which would have recorded the
station they were listening to instead of their own voice, on every voice
message and every QSO recording. It is not a microphone, and it is not a
pair of speakers either: the audio going the other way is transmit audio.
So it is listed for 'From radio' and 'To radio', and taken out of the mic
and the listening dropdowns.
And the RX monitor is disabled when the radio IS the source, with a line
saying why: the TCI stream is pushed into the QSO recorder, and nothing
plays it to the speakers. The button was there, enabled, doing nothing
audible — which is worse than a button that says it cannot.
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.
Telling somebody's amplifier where to be is a write to their station, and
it now has a switch — the SAME switch an Acom uses. 'Keep the amplifier on
the radio's band' is one idea to an operator; that it needs a second
serial port and a rig emulator on one amplifier and a single ^BN on
another is our business, not a reason for two checkboxes.
On by default for a KPA, because an amplifier left on the wrong band is
the worse outcome of the two, and the operator who has wired it straight
to the radio turns it off once. The hint says exactly that case, since it
is the only one where a second voice telling the amplifier where to be is
unwelcome.
Two things the wiring got wrong, both visible on screen.
A KPA fell through to the PowerGenius branch of the amplifier card and was
drawn as one — titled 'POWERGENIUSXL · ELECRAFT KPA1500', with a
PowerGenius's meters and none of its own. It has a card now: OPERATE, ON
and OFF, band, power, SWR, temperature, supply, and the fault across the
end. The OPERATE button carries a tooltip saying it also clears the fault,
because that is the button an operator already has under the cursor when
they need it.
And the band-follow option was offered on it. That option exists because
an Acom POLLS a transceiver and has no command to be given a band, so
following it needs a second serial port and a rig emulator answering those
polls. The KPA has ^BN — OpsLog simply tells it, on the link it is already
using, and only when the band CHANGES. The option is gone from the KPA and
the telling is automatic.
Also: Acom rather than ACOM everywhere it is read, which is how the
company writes it. Identifiers, package names and log lines are left
alone — renaming those is churn with no reader.
Wired into the multi-amplifier support that already carries the SPE, the
ACOM and the PowerGenius: a fourth brand rather than a fourth mechanism.
The linking, the fan-out and the poll all work on it unchanged.
Three things the KPA does differently, and each is handled where it shows
rather than explained in a hint:
- A KPA500 has no network side at all. Choosing it puts the entry on
serial, and a configuration still asking for TCP is refused with a
line saying so instead of retrying an address that cannot answer.
- The amplifier answers ^ON while its main supplies are OFF — a sleeping
microcontroller stays awake for exactly that — so power-on stays
available over the network, unlike the SPE and ACOM which need their
serial control lines.
- Going to OPERATE clears the current fault, everything except
temperature. The widget says so under the fault, because the button
that fixes it is the one already on screen.
Defaults that leave a working configuration when the model is changed:
38400 baud, TCP port 1500, and a full-scale power mark of 500 or 1500 W
by model — a KPA500 read against a 1500 W scale looks idle at full
output.
Two faults, and the first was a design mistake of mine.
The choice was written only as the award override, to keep the imported
CNTY as a record of what HAMLOG said. But CNTY is what the comparison
READS, so the contact went on disagreeing for ever: settle a hundred
rows, run the comparison again, get the same hundred back. The reasoning
was about preserving evidence; the effect was a button with no visible
consequence anywhere, which is indistinguishable from one that does
nothing. This is the operator's own log, and correcting a field in it is
the point of the exercise. The district now lands in CNTY as well as in
the award reference.
And the settled rows stayed on screen, which made the same button look
broken a second time. They are dropped as they are applied — locally,
rather than by re-running the comparison, which reads the whole log and
would be seconds of silence on a remote database to be told what is
already known. The agree/disagree counters follow.
The comparison could show two hundred contacts where the log and the
database name different districts, and leave the operator with nothing to
do about any of them but open each QSO and edit it by hand.
Now each row carries the two values as buttons: click the district you
keep, then apply. There are shortcuts for keeping one source everywhere,
and applying is a separate act — clicking through two hundred rows with
each one written as it is clicked would make a slip permanent before the
reading was finished.
The choice is written as the contact's AWARD REFERENCE, not over the
imported CNTY, and that distinction is the point. CNTY is what the
downloaded log said; overwriting it would destroy the evidence the
comparison runs on, and the next comparison would agree with itself and
prove nothing. The override is the operator's decision, it is what the
award engine counts, and it beats both sources. So the log keeps saying
what it said, the database keeps saying what it says, and the contact
counts for the district that was chosen.
The buttons show the districts themselves rather than a tick box: someone
arbitrating between RO-19 and KO-05 should be picking a value they can
read, not remembering which source a checked box stood for.
The TCI section of the audio settings was an investigation: open the
stream, read what arrives, record ten seconds to listen to, key a tone.
It answered every question it was built for — the frame layout, the
sample width, that the radio asks rather than follows a clock, that the
transmit audio source decides — and confirmed 80 W on real hardware.
None of that belongs in front of an operator now. The radio is simply one
of the devices in the two dropdowns, and choosing it IS the configuration:
one control, in the place where the question is already being asked.
Keeping the tick box beside it would have been two switches for one
decision, with the second one where nobody looks.
Gone with it: the stream/record/probe bindings, the audio.tci_rx setting,
and twenty-four translation keys. The plumbing they proved out stays and
now carries the voice keyer.
A SunSDR carries its audio on the same WebSocket as its commands, so
OpsLog can take it directly: no virtual cable, no second sound card, no
Windows mixer between the recording and the air. The radio appears as a
device in both audio lists and can be chosen for either direction.
Everything here was settled on real hardware over one evening, and none of
it was guessable from the documentation:
- The receive stream answers format=3 for four-byte floats, so the
sample width is derived from the frame rather than trusted from the
field.
- The radio asks for transmit audio only when the transmission is the
CLIENT'S, and only when its transmit audio source is TCI rather than
the microphone.
- The chrono is a REQUEST, not a clock: no payload, carrying the size it
wants, 47 times a second. Audio goes out in answer to it and never on
a timer of our own — a timer was the first attempt and all 234 frames
of it were ignored.
Confirmed: a clean test recording, and 80 W out of a 1 kHz tone.
A first real transmission settled one question and raised a better one.
With the receive stream open and six seconds of transmit, the radio sent
282 frames of receive audio and NOTHING else: no chrono, no transmit
audio. So the chrono the documentation describes is not offered to a
client that merely happens to be connected while the operator keys the
microphone, and waiting for it to appear is waiting for nothing.
The reading that fits is that the radio asks for audio when the
transmission is the CLIENT'S and takes the microphone when it is the
operator's — which makes the experiment obvious. Key it from here, push a
1 kHz tone, and watch. Chrono frames appearing gives their size and
cadence by measurement instead of by guesswork; no chrono but a tone on
the meter is just as useful, because then the pacing is optional and the
voice keyer can push frames at the rate the stream already runs at.
A tone rather than silence so the answer shows on the power meter and not
only in the log.
It transmits, so: an explicit button inside a warning box, five seconds,
capped at ten, and every path out unkeys — including the panic that has
not happened yet and a socket that dies mid-tone. A transmitter left keyed
by a defect is the one fault here that would reach somebody else's band.
Writes are now serialised too. send() held the lock only long enough to
read the connection, which was enough while every command came from the
poll loop; a stream of audio frames from a second goroutine is not, and
gorilla panics on a concurrent write rather than failing quietly.
Confirmed on a real SunSDR: the stream decodes and the test recording
plays back clean. So it can do the job a virtual audio cable was doing —
this wires it to the QSO recorder, which already accepts a pushed source
(the Icom network audio uses the same door).
The conversion lives here rather than in internal/cat: the radio's job is
to hand over what it sent, not to know that the recorder works in 16 kHz
mono. Three samples are AVERAGED rather than two of them dropped —
decimating by picking every third folds everything above 8 kHz back into
the voice band, and on a receiver that is hiss, which a QSO recording has
plenty of already.
Off by default, and applied the moment it is switched: it replaces a
sound card the operator has already wired up, and an option that needs a
restart to take effect reads as an option that does not work.
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 backend list mixed two different questions. 'Icom (USB)' and 'Icom
(network)' were separate entries; Kenwood and Elecraft hid the same
choice in a field further down; and Flex, TCI and OmniRig sat in the same
list as if they were the same kind of answer. An operator picks a radio
and then says how it is plugged in, so that is what the panel asks, in
that order, and the two answers together choose the backend.
Each brand offers only the connections it has, and a brand with one way
in still shows it, greyed: 'there is no choice here' is an answer and an
empty space is not. The stored backend names are unchanged — 'icom-net'
is still 'icom-net' — so a settings file written by an older build keeps
working, and brand+connection are DERIVED from it rather than held
alongside it, which is what keeps them from drifting apart when something
else writes the backend.
USB, RS-232-to-Ethernet, and the radio's own network protocol are three
different things, so they are three entries in one dropdown — and the
transport is now a stored setting rather than something deduced from
which field happened to be filled in. The old rule (a host wins whenever
it is not empty) is invisible from the settings page: someone who typed a
host months ago and later set a COM port had a radio that never answered
and nothing on screen to say why.
The third entry is named and refused, with the reason. It is a session
with its own framing and login, not the CAT byte stream over a socket, so
it has to be written per radio and against one — and a K4 owner reading
this list should be told that, not left wondering whether the empty
address field was the problem.
The upgrade reads an older install from what it has: a configured host
means the bridge, which is what the previous code used it for. Pinned by
a test, including the case that matters after the fact — choosing USB
with a stale host still stored gives the COM port.
The network option IS implemented — the same ASCII CAT over TCP instead
of a cable, for a ser2net bridge, an Ethernet-serial adapter, or a radio
exposing its raw CAT port. What was wrong is how it was offered: the COM
port and the network address sat side by side with nothing to say that
the address wins whenever it is not empty.
Worse, the example address read 192.168.1.50:4532. That is Hamlib
rigctld's port — a different protocol, and the one OpsLog SERVES under
'Share CAT'. Anyone copying the example was pointing the radio link at
OpsLog's own server.
Now one choice, then the fields that belong to it. And when the far end
answers something that is not the radio's CAT, the error says that rather
than 'check the baud rate', which over TCP is advice about a setting that
cannot be the cause.
A station with a switch knows something the log does not: which antenna
is actually connected. The working conditions hold what was PLANNED for
the band, and stay right until the operator throws the switch — after
which every QSO keeps claiming the other antenna.
Optional, and off by default: a station that names its antennas
differently in the two places would otherwise find its log quietly
rewritten. The name written is the one configured on the device, since
that is the name the operator gave it and the one they will look for.
WHICH PORT is the real problem, and the reason this is not a one-liner.
The switch has two, the radio has two jacks, and the QSO went out through
one of them; naming the wrong port's antenna is worse than naming the
band default, because it looks authoritative. The radio's own TX antenna
selection decides, and the jack-to-port wiring is a setting — it is the
station's cabling and neither device can report it.
When the port cannot be told — a transverter jack, a rig that reports
nothing, both switch ports live — nothing is written and the band default
stands. Silence beats a confident guess in a field nobody re-checks.
The SunSDR announces its own stream at connect —
audio_stream_sample_type:float32 and audio_stream_channels:2 — and both
were being logged as unhandled while the code worked the format out from
frame arithmetic. The declaration is better evidence and arrives before
the first frame; the arithmetic stays as the check on it. The channel
count now drives the mix-down instead of an assumed stereo.
Adds a ten-second test recording, written as a WAV beside the QSO
recordings. Counting frames proves a socket is delivering bytes; it says
nothing about whether those bytes are the receiver's audio, at the right
rate, in the right order. A stream decoded with the width wrong or the
samples misaligned counts exactly as well as a correct one and sounds
like a fan — so the test is a file the operator can play, the same way
the CW decoder was settled on the air rather than on a spectrogram.
The file is written at the rate the RADIO reported, not a constant: a
recording at the wrong rate plays at the wrong speed, which is the one
fault that would be blamed on the decoding.
Two things reported together, both about a list that fights back.
The GRID froze nothing: every spot landed at the top and pushed the rest
down, so a few rows in, the callsign under the pointer had moved by the
time the click arrived. It now stops redrawing as soon as it is scrolled
away from the top and says how many spots are waiting; reaching the top
again, or clicking the notice, releases it. The arrivals are counted by
finding the frozen top row in the live list rather than by comparing
lengths — the list is a ring buffer, so once it is full a length
comparison would report nothing new for the rest of the evening.
The COMMAND BUTTONS were capped at 120 characters. A DXSpider filter
naming the prefixes an operator wants runs well past that, and the field
just stopped accepting keystrokes: the command was saved truncated with
nothing to say why. 500 now, with the full text in the tooltip since the
box cannot show it.
A SunSDR already carries its receive audio on the same WebSocket as its
commands, so a virtual audio cable and a second sound card are two pieces
of plumbing an operator installs for no reason. This is the receive half:
what the QSO recorder and the CW decoder need.
The reader now looks at the frame type. It used to ignore it and split
every frame on ';' -- harmless only for as long as no stream was ever
opened, since audio bytes would otherwise have been handed to the command
parser a hundred times a second.
NOTHING HERE IS CONFIRMED ON A RADIO. The header layout comes from the
TCI documentation, and the stream-type numbers are exactly the sort of
detail a document gets right and a memory of it does not -- so the first
forty frames of a session are logged verbatim, and a test bench in
Preferences > Audio reports the sample rate the radio chose, the frames
arriving and the peak level of the last second. 'The stream is open' and
'audio is arriving' are different claims and only the second is worth
anything to whoever tries this first.
Transmit (the voice keyer) is the other half and is deliberately absent:
it has to answer the radio's chrono packets at the right pace, and that
is worth doing once the format is settled on real hardware.
SWT20 was written from memory of the reference rather than from Table 7,
and 20 is not an ATU switch at all — it would have pressed something else
on a real K3. An operator read the table out for us: switch 19 is the ATU
row, TAP for a tuning cycle and HOLD for tuner in line or bypassed.
Adds the HOLD as its own ATU button, because on the radio they are two
different things: tuning is a cycle you start, bypassing is a state you
leave it in.
Power takes 0-110 W on an Elecraft, per the reference — a K3 makes a
little over its rated output — while a Kenwood keeps 200.
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.
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.
It filled the window: on a wide screen a slider ended a hand's width from
its own label and the panel stopped reading as one instrument. Capped and
centred like the Yaesu, Icom and Flex consoles, grouped into Meters,
Levels and Receive cards, with the level sliders in two columns.
Also opens the 0.26.12 block: the TQSL logging and this console were
written after v0.26.11 was tagged.
So the tester can exercise everything in one session instead of one
control per build: RF and mic gain, squelch, preamp, attenuator, NB, NR,
AGC, filter width, antenna, RIT/XIT with a clear, and the keyer speed.
The analogue scales differ between an Elecraft and a Kenwood — RF gain
000-250, mic 000-060, squelch 000-029 against 0-255 — so each is mapped
through its own full scale and shown as a percentage. Using one rig's
range on the other silently halves or doubles every setting.
Antenna only appears when the radio answers AN: a K3 without the internal
ATU has one socket, and a switch that goes nowhere is worse than none.
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.
The transmit row already carries SPLIT, TUNE, MOX, the chaser, its offset
and the TX readout. The marker field was the one control on it that is
set once -- to agree with SDC -- and then never touched again, so it is
summoned by right-clicking the button instead of parked there. Enter
commits, Escape restores. The button's tooltip says so: an unannounced
right-click is not a feature.
The marker field needs no caption -- it sits against a button showing the
same text -- and 'offset' spelled out crowded a row that already carries
SPLIT, the chaser and the TX readout.
The marker text is chosen in the skimmer, and the two have to agree or
nothing fires -- so it belongs next to the switch, not in a settings page
the operator would have to remember exists. Kept as raw text until blur:
it is a comma-separated list and normalising each keystroke would eat the
comma as it is typed.
Working a DXpedition split means guessing where it listens. The useful
information is not the callsign the DX answered but the FREQUENCY that
station was calling on, and a CW skimmer already marks it: SDC posts each
decoded report to the panadapter as a spot.
Those spots reach OpsLog through the radio's spot feed. On a marker, the
TRANSMIT slice moves there plus a signed offset; the receive slice never
moves, because losing the DX is worse than missing a call. The marker
text is a setting -- it is chosen in SDC by the operator, so any constant
here would be wrong for whoever chose otherwise -- and the switch is a
button beside SPLIT, since it is turned on when a DXpedition appears and
off when it is worked.
Moves are throttled and ignore a marker landing where the slice already
is: a busy pile-up produces several reports a second and the slice would
otherwise never be anywhere long enough to call.
The spot feed is now subscribed to unconditionally. It was tied to
OpsLog's own spot overlay, so an operator running SDC with the overlay
off received nothing -- the reason no foreign spot was ever logged. The
connect-time 'spot clear' stays behind the overlay flag: it wipes every
spot on the radio, a skimmer's included.
The import printed four numbers and left nothing behind. 1106 matched
and 395 unmatched out of 1501 is not a report: the operator cannot see
which contacts were confirmed, nor work through the discrepancies.
Two additions. The Results view is now filled with the confirmed
contacts, flagged new entity/band/mode/slot against what LoTW and paper
QSL already confirm -- the only sense in which a HAMLOG confirmation
changes anything. And the unmatched ones can be written out as ADIF,
because a few hundred of them are a list to open and compare, not
something to read in a log window.
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.
After an import that inserted instead of updating, there was no way to
ask which records it created: an import of old contacts carries old QSO
dates, so it hides among them. created_at is the only column that knows,
and it was not filterable.
Listed as a date column so a bare YYYY-MM-DD compares on the date part,
like qso_date.
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.
A log imported from HAMLOG.online carries the Russian district in CNTY, and the
offline RDA database has its own answer for the same contact. Which wins is a
real question — but only if the two are independent. If HAMLOG's value is itself
a lookup in the same kind of database, there is nothing to arbitrate and a
precedence rule would be ceremony around a redundancy.
So this measures instead of deciding: Settings → RDA gains a read-only compare
that reports agreements, disagreements, and the contacts where only one side
knows, then lists the disagreements — callsign, date, both districts, whether
the database answer was a DATED record (the award administrators' own fact) or
the callsign's current district (an assumption), and whether the QSO is
confirmed on HAMLOG (their value has then been through a match of two logs).
It changes nothing in the log. What to do about a conflict is the next decision,
and it should be taken with the operator's own numbers in hand.
Also: the four HAMLOG fields become filterable, so 'never sent there' is a
filter rather than a guess. A field that can be written and not read back is
half a feature — pinned by a test against the bulk-editable list.
Preferences → Confirmations gains a HAMLOG.online row, sent and received, with
the same defaults every other service has: a new QSO can start at N so the
backlog is meaningful from the first contact. The defaults reach it through a
new setExtraDefault — fill() writes through a pointer to a string field and
these two live in the extras map, which no pointer reaches.
The QSO grid gains four HAMLOG columns (status and date, both directions),
hidden by default: a column per service shown to everyone is how a grid becomes
unreadable.
And the paragraph explaining what "Sent" means is gone from that page.
Bulk edit offered two HAMLOG fields, both dates, and the first question they
drew was the right one: which of these is the status? Collapsing the flag into
the date was neat in the storage and a riddle in the dialog, where the eight
fields above it are four status/date pairs.
So four keys now — APP_OPSLOG_HAMLOG_SENT / _SENT_DATE and _QSL / _QSL_DATE —
and four fields, in the shape an operator already reads for eQSL, QRZ, Club Log
and HRDLog. The stamp written after a successful upload follows: Y in the
status, the day in the date.
Nothing else changes: the QSL Manager's backlog still asks whether the sent key
is present, and the award engine still treats any non-N value in the QSL key as
a confirmation.
A log sent to hamlog.online by hand — an ADIF exported from OpsLog and dropped
on their site — had no way of being marked as sent afterwards. The QSL Manager
then listed every one of those contacts as backlog and offered to upload them a
second time.
Both HAMLOG keys join the bulk-editable extras, so a selection (or the whole
log) can be stamped in one pass. They are DATES rather than Y/N flags because
that is the shape the sent stamp already uses: the QSL Manager's backlog asks
whether the key is present, and a date also says when it went.
The test pins that they are reachable through the extras path and NOT offered as
columns — a mapping claiming both would write to a table that has neither.
HAMLOG.online is now reachable: Settings → External services → HAMLOG.ONLINE
takes the API key, the auto-upload switch and the timing, exactly like the six
services beside it, and a link opens the page where the key is issued.
The button next to it checks the KEY, not the connection. HAMLOG answers
KEYSTATUS with the callsign the key belongs to — something no other service
here offers — so the result reads "Key is valid — account F4BPO" rather than a
green tick. A key pasted from a club account or a second station is visible at
once, which is precisely the mistake a tick would have hidden.
No on-close timing, for the same reason as Cloudlog: there is no per-QSO upload
column to select a backlog from at shutdown, so the option would have done
nothing. Immediate or delayed, and a stored on_close falls back to immediate
rather than silently uploading nothing.
The appearance rules gain a HAMLOG.online channel too, so a row can be coloured
"confirmed" on that alone. It reads the ADIF extras — the standard names a field
for hamlog.EU and none for hamlog.ONLINE — using the same keys the award engine
reads, so the two can never disagree about what a confirmation is. "To send"
skips it: a QSO is either uploaded or not, there is no card to be owed.
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.
The grid-square map drew the world two or three times across a wide window, each
copy carrying the same squares — worldCopyJump earns its keep on the great-circle
map, where a path reads better crossing a second Asia, and costs only confusion
on a map of where you have been heard. It is off here, the tiles no longer wrap,
and addBasemap takes the option so the other map is untouched.
Zooming out far enough to hold Greenland and Antarctica together was impossible:
the floor was zoom 1, and one step further out was already too far. Zoom 0 is
the whole planet, and the view now opens on a fitWorld computed from the
container rather than a guessed zoom level — repeated once when the container
first has a real size, because the tab is mounted hidden.
That exposed the next thing: Esri answers a request outside the world with a grey
"Map data not yet available" tile, and zoomed out that was most of the screen.
The tile layers carry a bounds, so those tiles are never asked for, and what is
left beside the planet is the panel's own background instead of a white slab.
Finally the mode filter offers All, Phone and CW beside Digital and FTx. The
backend already accepted all of them — GridSquares understands "ALL" and the
ModeClass names — only the interface was offering two.
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.
rouggy