The rest between two series was two minutes — four overs on FT8, by
which time the DX has worked four other callers and half the time has
gone. It is now counted in the station's OWN overs and is one by default:
seven calls, one over listened through, and it goes again if the station
is still there. The deadline lands mid-cycle on purpose, so "sit out one
over" means one over rather than depending on a millisecond of clock
skew.
A period the target was DECODED in is never counted as a miss. A period
is judged more than once — decodes arrive in a burst and stragglers
follow — and a later judgement holds a partial view of it, not evidence
of absence: D2ACE answered in the very period the counter then read as a
miss.
The readout moved out of the Auto button and beside it. "Auto D2ACE 1/7
·1/3" read as one number, and the control changed width every period.
The callsign is now the biggest thing on the row, the calls and the
missed periods each carry a label, the miss count appears only once there
is one, and a station being waited for gets its own amber chip.
The watch list was a tab, and an operator working FT8 lives on the decodes
one: a station they had asked to be told about turned up on a screen they
were not looking at. The same answer is now docked in the widget strip,
above the tabs, reduced to what is worth acting on — on the air and still
needed, one row per band and mode, with the cluster's own NEW DXCC /
NEW BAND / NEW SLOT badge and a click that tunes. Off by default. The
"active and needed" answer costs a debounced query per visible slot, so it
is written once (lib/watchlistSpots) and the tab uses it too.
Auto-call:
- It answers a new prefix, county, state, square or park. Those markers
are orthogonal to the entity, they ranked as nothing-needed, and the
engine sat through a never-worked WPX prefix calling CQ. New rung at
the foot of the ladder, gated by the chase switches the badges use —
which meant making those switches portable, since the backend cannot
read localStorage.
- It calls THROUGH a pileup. Giving up the moment the DX answered
somebody else is precisely how a queue is not worked; the call and miss
counters already bound the effort, and a station in mid-exchange is
still never chosen as a new target.
The PSK Reporter panel now follows the station auto-call is waiting for:
the analysis takes a history query and a period or two to fill, so
starting it when the DX comes free is starting it too late.
Callbook lookup: a compound callsign with a page of its OWN keeps that
page's location. QRZ files HP/WE9G under exactly that form, with the
Panama square the station is operating from, and the rule that drops a
home address from a portable call was throwing it away. The record's own
country tells an operation's page from a home page.
Changelog: entries may open with [NEW], drawn as a pill in the What's new
dialog — a release is mostly fixes and the two or three genuinely new
things should not have to be found by reading all of it.
Six faults from an evening on 60 m, all in the same family: the engine
judging a station by what the log wants from it and forgetting what is
already under way.
- An exchange was abandoned mid-QSO. The reply lands in the same period
the ladder is re-read, and that period was judged before the reply was
taken into account, so a better-ranked caller took the slot from a
station that had just come back to us. The answer is settled first now,
and our own report counts as being inside the exchange too — which also
protects a QSO the operator started by hand.
- A station just picked started with misses against it. Its transmit slot
was unknown until a second decode, and with the parity unknown every
period counted, including the one spent transmitting to it.
- The freed slot after "it is working somebody else" was thrown away: the
period's decodes are in hand, so the next station is picked from them
rather than fifteen seconds later. Never mid-over.
- Auto-call is never armed from a stored setting — not at launch, not on
a profile switch. It is the one feature that puts the station on the
air by itself and OpsLog starts with Windows.
- It says what it is waiting for: a wanted station in a QSO with somebody
else now shows beside the Auto button instead of looking idle.
- Switching profile left the previous logbook's verdicts on screen. The
worked-index, chase-new and the frontend's cached verdicts are dropped
when the logbook changes.
FT decodes: distance column, a message addressed to you set whole in
green (the station you are calling keeps a tint — most of what it sends
goes to other people), badge order L / Wkd / WL, list cleared when the
RIG changes band.
Rotor: new world-map compass from EC1KD's design, with the Ultrabeam boom
and second lobe restored and the compact form preserved; the classic dial
is kept and Settings → Rotator chooses between them. Stop no longer
flickers on a rotor standing still — movement was inferred from a degree,
less than the jitter a controller reports at rest.
Decodes:
- one click SELECTS, two transmit. A single click handed the decode
straight to WSJT-X as a reply, so brushing a row while reading the
band started calling a station.
- the list empties for a receiver that changes band, and a receiver
column appears when more than one is feeding one merged list.
- the period clock turns red while transmitting: it is the one thing on
the screen that moves, so it is where the eye already is.
- a WL badge, after the LoTW "L" — one letter, always in the same
place, so the column does not shift from row to row.
- the auto-call switch, its target and its count, and the chase list:
naming the station you are waiting for is done while watching the
band, not in a settings tree.
Themes: DXHunter's slate with its own blue, and the same slate with
OpsLog's orange. Counted across its sources rather than guessed from
one panel — blue is 132 uses to violet's 25, and the violet is the PSK
Reporter panel alone.
Watchlist: drawn as DXHunter draws it — the callsign in the interface
font rather than monospaced, which is the difference that shows with
the two windows side by side.
FT Map: arcs no longer run off the side of the map. The map shows one
world, and a path crossing the antimeridian was drawn past 180° into
the blank space beside it — from VK that is most of them.
Cluster: "superfox", "fox/hound" and "F/H" in a comment are read as
FT8. They are WSJT-X's DXpedition transmit modes, and the comment fell
through to the band plan and came out DATA — which then decided the
band+mode verdict.
A decoder is named by what it IS: Nexus sends its packets as "Tempo",
the engine inside it, and OpsLog showed a program nobody has heard of.
HAMLOG.online no longer issues API keys, and its upload API takes
nothing else. An operator without a key cannot obtain one, so the
auto-upload switch, the on-close sweep and the 'Send to' entry were all
arming something that could only fail — silently, once per QSO.
Closed at the source rather than hidden in the UI: the upload returns a
sentinel that says why, the manager stops routing to it and says so once
a session, and the manual path refuses with the same words. The settings
page states it plainly instead of showing a switch that does nothing.
Nothing else goes. Their confirmations arrive as an ADIF FILE and never
needed a key, so that import stays; the sent/received state already in
operators' logs stays readable, filterable and bulk-editable; and the
upload itself is kept whole as uploadHamlogLive, still covered by its
request-shape tests, against the day keys come back.
A list in Appearance, in the row's own order, dragged to rearrange —
with QSO entry and the F1-F5 panel at its head, locked. They are not in
that row at all, and letting an operator push the thing they type into
behind a rotator dial is not a preference, it is a trap.
Implemented with flexbox ORDER rather than by moving the JSX: in a
component this size, reordering the tree would have moved every
condition, ref and hook with it. Each slot keeps its place in the source
and receives an order property, so a widget switched off still holds its
rank and returns where the operator left it.
An unknown key from a later version joins the end rather than the front,
and a key that no longer exists is dropped — an old preference can
neither reorder a widget it has never heard of nor hide one. Opens
0.27.10.
Only Kenwood implements it — TX1 is that family's second transmit
command — and every other backend keys the one way it knows. A checkbox
offered to all of them would change nothing on most, which is the same
dead furniture as ANT2 on a radio with one socket. Gated on the Kenwood
backend, and the label says so.
From a TS-590SG report: the voice keyer played through the rig's USB
codec and the radio transmitted silence. Its manual says why — 'TX P1,
0: SEND (normal transmission using the MIC input), 1: DATA SEND
(ACC2/USB input)' — and OpsLog only ever sent the bare TX, so the radio
dutifully opened a front microphone nobody was speaking into.
An option on the audio page, shown for CAT keying, says where the
keyer's audio actually arrives; the manager routes it to a backend that
draws the distinction and falls back to the ordinary key for every rig
where one PTT is all there is. Test PTT goes down the same path, so it
tests what will happen rather than something adjacent.
A decoding application that loses its CAT link keeps announcing the last
dial frequency it knew, and every decode after that carries a stale
band. Nothing downstream can tell: the entity verdicts, the band filter
and the FT map all believe it. Seen for real — MSHV kept saying 80 m,
and Korea read as a NEW BAND because on 80 m it would have been.
Said, not decided. Taking the rig's band instead would be wrong for
anyone decoding a second receiver on another band, and a warning costs
that setup nothing but a line to read past. Shown only while CAT is
actually connected: an empty band means there is nothing to compare
with, never that the rig is on no band. Opens 0.27.9.
One row per digital mode would be the honest layout, and there is no
height for it: the matrix sits in a fixed panel beside a dozen widgets.
So the row keeps its place and changes what it answers — DIG, then each
digital mode the operator's own list holds, in the order they put them
in, then back to DIG.
It costs no round trip. The query behind the matrix already grouped by
band AND mode; only the collapse to a class threw that away, so the same
cell is now published under the raw mode name too. Digital only: PH and
CW have nothing to cycle through.
On a specific mode the you-are-here mark follows THAT mode, or every FT4
entry would light whichever digital row the rotation happened to rest
on. A four-letter mode drops to 9px rather than widen a column sized for
three characters and push the whole matrix sideways. Opens 0.27.8.
The chase switches were born on the DX Cluster page because the cluster
was the only thing that drew their badges. They now decide what the FT
decode list and Chase new say as well, and settings that govern three
screens should not live under the name of one of them. They move to a
DXHunter page — named for what it is about, and for what is meant to
land beside it as more of DXHunter's ideas are ported over.
US states join the switchable markers, gated the same way as POTA,
counties, prefixes and squares: badge, filter chip and display marker,
all from the one chaseAllows question.
A soundcard mode is USB with audio in the mic path, and that is what
most rigs need. Asking for the mode by NAME is the better answer on a
modern transceiver with a DATA position and the wrong one on an older
set, where the CAT layer resolves 'digital' to RTTY/FSK — OmniRig does
exactly that, per rig file, and there is no arguing with it from here.
The operator clicking an FT8 spot landed in FSK, which keys from a
mark/space generator and cannot pass FT8 at all.
Applied in SetCATMode, the one funnel every backend and every caller
goes through, so it holds for a spot click, the band map and the mode
selector alike. The QSO is still logged as FT8: this is what the radio
is put in, not what the contact was.
HAMLOG.online was wired into all three when it arrived; HamQTH shipped
with only its uploader and its editor row, so the log could not be asked
'which contacts have never gone there' — the question that precedes
every backlog upload — and a log uploaded to HamQTH by hand could not be
marked, leaving OpsLog offering to send every one of those contacts
again. Sent side only, both whitelists, both panels, two hidden-by-
default columns.
The per-QSO API is the only correct way to send a SELECTION, and at the
pace it must be driven a 14k backlog costs the better part of an hour.
HamQTH's other endpoint takes a whole log as one file — and REPLACES
what is on the site with it: its documentation says plainly that partial
uploads do not exist. So it is offered as its own deliberate act behind
a confirmation, never as the batch path behind 'send these', where it
would delete every QSO the operator had not selected.
Scoped to the callsign this profile uploads as, so a database holding
two operators' contacts cannot push one into the other's log; tar.gz
above 12 MB because the ceiling is 20 and a six-figure log passes it as
text; and every QSO not already stamped is marked sent afterwards, in
bulk, so the backlog list agrees with reality.
The colour already said connected; the word beside it said it again, in
the widest part of a row that has to hold five servers. It goes, and the
pills earn the job nothing else in the app had: reaching ONE cluster
without opening Settings. Click connects or drops that session — a
connecting one included, so a server retrying into a dead host can be
stopped. State, retry count, address and last error move into the
tooltip, where they cost no width.
ctrl+wheel is the WINDOW zoom everywhere else in OpsLog, and one gesture
that resizes the whole app over one panel and one band map over another
is a gesture nobody can trust. The + and - buttons keep the zoom, and
the footer hint stops advertising what is gone.
The DX-World headlines now carry a chase badge like the announcements —
but ENTITY-LEVEL only. A headline names no band, and asking the slot
question without one answers 'new band' for every entity ever worked:
the one mistake that costs a QSO. So the news says NEW DXCC or worked,
and the sharper verdicts stay where the bands and modes are known.
A legend is a reference, not a running display: once its colours are
learnt it spends four lines of a short screen saying nothing new. A
chevron in the footer folds it, the same chevron brings it back, and the
choice survives a restart.
A DXpeditions tab holding the two feeds the DX world announces itself
on: NG3K's ADXO (structured — dates, entity, calls, bands, modes, QSL
route) and DX-World's headlines. What a logger can say that a news
reader cannot is whether the operation is worth chasing, so every
announcement is put through the SAME verdict the cluster paints on a
spot — one badge, strongest wins, dimmed when the need is only a missing
QSL — with an 'only what I need' filter. One click watches every
callsign of an operation; the news headlines are mined for callsigns so
they can be watched the same way.
Parsers ported from DXHunter's and pinned with table tests against real
feed text: the 'as PJ2/W2APF' mining, the DXCC-prefix-first
normalisation without which no spot ever matches, both ADXO date forms,
and the '160-6m' span whose unit is written once (DXHunter read that as
6m alone and lost the low end).
Watchlist membership now announces itself app-wide, on the same card as
a new version: the bindings emit watchlist:changed, so a call added from
the cluster or this tab is confirmed where the operator is actually
looking — the panel's own inline message never was.
Chase POTA already withdrew its badge, filter chip and column when
unchecked; US counties and new prefixes now have the same switch, and
unchecking Chase new grids finally withdraws the NEW GRID badge too (the
backend stopped learning squares but the display kept shouting the ones
it knew — the setting is mirrored to localStorage so the display layer
can gate synchronously). All withdrawal happens at the display layer:
the facts keep being computed, so re-ticking a box needs no rescan.
qso_realtime.php with the account's callbook credentials (which the
external-services config falls back to when its own are blank), one ADIF
record per QSO, prg=OpsLog. HTTP status IS the answer: 200 saved, 400
rejected (a duplicate counts as delivered, like HRDLog's insert 0), 403
credentials. Sent-state lives in APP_OPSLOG_HAMQTH_SENT extras like
HAMLOG.online — ADIF names no HamQTH field. Auto-upload on log, on-close
batch, right-click Send to, QSL Manager backlog, and a Test button that
authenticates against the callbook login, which cannot touch the log.
Fixes a real mis-route on the way: manual 'Send to HAMLOG.online' had no
branch in runManualUpload and fell through to QRZ.com — the selection was
uploaded to the wrong service with the QRZ key. Both extras-stamped
services now have their own branch.
Two new QSO columns, clublog_qso_download_status/date — a Club Log MATCH,
the service's own confirmation (both stations uploaded the QSO, paired
within 15 minutes). Full promoted-column lockstep: migration 0031, repo
insert/scan, ADIF dictionary + import + export (app-defined
CLUBLOG_QSO_DOWNLOAD_*), table columns, filter builder, bulk edit and the
QSO editor's Club Log row.
The QSL Manager's Club Log entry now actually downloads: getmatches.php
with the existing account settings and the embedded application key,
incremental via the match-completion date filter, matched call+band+mode
±15 min with a mode-blind fallback because Club Log reports 'false' for
modes it cannot infer. Matches always exist on both sides, so unmatched
ones are listed rather than skeleton-added.
And Super Check Partial can merge Club Log's weekly SCP list (~180k calls
worked on the air in the last 3 years) with MASTER.SCP — an opt-in
checkbox under the SCP setting.
An FTx menu between View and Tools gathers FT Decodes, FT Map and the
Grid squares map — three views of the same UDP feed that were buried in
Tools. And the watchlist spot rows swap the elastic country column for
fixed widths, so band, mode and frequency read as columns instead of
starting wherever each country name happened to end.
A new FT Map tab (Tools menu, beside FT decodes): every station decoded in
the last half hour drawn as a great-circle arc from the operator's own
square, coloured by band the way PSK Reporter taught everyone to read it,
fading with age, one arc per call (its freshest sighting), a tooltip with
call/grid/SNR, the MainMap basemap picker and a legend of only the bands on
screen.
Performance was the open question and it is answered structurally: the panel
mounts only while its tab is ACTIVE (zero cost otherwise), the map renders
canvas (one element, not one node per arc), arcs are capped at 300, and
redraws follow the decode list — every period, not every frame.
The WAS gap made visible: a worked-states set joins the cluster status cache
(distinct states over the three US entities), the status entries carry a
NewState flag wherever the state resolves (log county first, ULS licence
second), and the decode panel gains the badge in its status column plus the
filter chip alongside NEW/BAND/MODE/GRID. Colour from the shared marker
palette, so the cluster can adopt it later without a second hue.
Between the locator and the country, per its operator: the two-letter badge
anchors the eye and the spelled-out name answers it — 'SD' alone is a quiz
for a European. The status-cell badge from the first pass moves here.
Plain text, not a badge — it is a fact, not an action — placed first so a
WAS chaser can scan the column edge. Shown whenever the status cache knows
the state (log county data or the licence address).
The voice keyer grows to F1-F12 — the UI was already data-driven, so the
count constant, the F-key range and the labels are the whole change.
And the preferences stop stuttering on a busy station: every spot batch,
decode batch and CAT snapshot re-rendered the entire App tree behind the
dialog — cluster grid, decodes panel, thousands of nodes — and the pointer
janked over the very panel the operator was trying to use. While Settings is
open the flushes park their batches in the pending refs (bounded) and CAT
repaints at most every two seconds; closing the dialog drains everything.
Configure (message 15), mode field only, every other field sent as
no-change: an FT4 spot clicked while WSJT-X sits in FT8 lands the operator
ready to decode instead of staring at gibberish. Sent to every instance
heard this session — one already in the right mode treats it as a no-op —
and only for modes the decoder actually speaks (FT8/FT4/JT65/JT9/MSK144/
Q65/FST4); CW and SSB are none of its business. Toggle in the Connections
panel, on by default.
Message 13 paints callsigns in WSJT-X/JTDX's own Band Activity window with
verdicts from the same cluster status cache that colours the spot grid:
watchlist pink, new DXCC green, new band for its entity orange. Deduplicated
per instance+call+verdict, one datagram each; a verdict that lapses (the
operator worked them) clears that call, and turning the option off clears
everything via the protocol's CLEARALL!. Off by default, switch in the
Connections panel.
Message 7 asks a program heard for the first time this session to replay the
decodes already on its screen, so the FT decodes panel starts full instead of
empty until the next period. Replayed lines arrive marked not-new and are
shown but never auto-answered — the auto-caller now checks, on top of its
30-second freshness gate.
Its enable condition predated the network audio: with From-radio empty — the
normal network setup — the button was greyed out, and an operator who had
stopped listening had no way to start again from this panel. The stale 'later'
hints on both buttons said the network paths did not exist; they do.
Same remembered preference as the console's speaker button, surfaced where
the stream itself is enabled — tick RX audio and decide in the same breath
whether it reaches the speakers. Applied immediately, no save needed.
Muting the network RX audio took a trip through Settings → Audio → Stop
listening — two panels away from the console the operator is actually using.
A speaker button now sits beside ON/OFF (network only, like them): one click
to listen or mute, the recorder and the voice keyer unaffected, the choice
remembered across reconnects and launches.
The two-click arm goes: removing an entry is cheap to undo (type it again), so
it does not earn a confirmation its neighbours do not have. The bin reddens on
hover and the green line confirms the removal.
A green line under the toolbar says what was added (and as what — the contest
variant names the per-UTC-day rule); the already-exists error keeps its red
line. Both fade after four seconds: a stale 'added' from ten minutes ago reads
as a fresh one.
The prefix matching ported from DXHunter swallowed too much: a three-letter
special-event entry N8W lit up NEEDED for N8WCR, a different station entirely.
The implicit becomes explicit — a bare entry matches exactly that call, a
trailing star makes it a family: VK9* catches every VK9…, RI0SP* the
expedition's portable forms. A star anywhere else (or alone) is refused at Add
rather than silently matching nothing. Same rule in the backend Match and the
tab's own matcher, pinned by test.
Add-controls left, filters right, justify-between: when the pane narrows, the
whole filter group drops below as a block instead of shedding its last chip.
Shorter chip labels (Active / Needed) and a slimmer search keep both groups on
one line at the tab's normal width.
The counters are the tab's headline and now sit alone, centred, above the
toolbar; everything one interacts with lives on the second row. The inputs stop
shouting their placeholders — the uppercase belonged to the VALUE (callsigns),
not the hint text — and the auto-contest field says what it is.
DXHunter's header row, ported: Watchlist / Active / Needed counts up front and
the All-Modes select beside the other filters (DIGI matches the digital class,
SSB folds USB/LSB). Counters, card lists and the Active/Needed-only filters all
read the same mode-filtered view, so the numbers add up to what is on screen.
And the notify alert now asks the SAME worked-slot question the tab asks —
before making a sound. It used to fire on the raw spot while the tab's verdict
arrived on a debounce, so the bell rang for a slot that showed Worked a moment
later. Judged in the backend at emit time: exact slot for named modes, digital
class for generic DATA, today-only for contest entries.
The wiring script died on an app.go anchor mid-run: the backend half was
committed, the frontend half (the pattern field, the changed-event refresh, the
i18n keys) never ran. Replayed; the field sits after Add.
The watchlist joins the Main-tab pane list (Settings → Main view), rendered in
a card like the other docked panels.
The three filters persist across tab switches — the component unmounts on every
switch, and filters that reset each time are filters nobody trusts.
Needed-only now hides the worked SPOT LINES as well as the all-worked cards,
which is DXHunter's own Not-Worked behaviour and the reported complaint: a
filter that says needed and still lists five green Worked rows answers a
different question than the one asked.
The add-row checkbox is relabelled 'as contest' — it marks the entry being
ADDED, and read as a filter beside the All/DX/Contest buttons it looked
redundant.
The concept, transplanted: a list of callsigns or prefixes being hunted,
matched against the live spot stream, one card per entry with the spots
underneath and the two questions that matter answered on every line — is this
slot still needed, and what is it worth (the cluster's own NEW badges, read
from the same status index).
The file is DXHunter's own watchlist.json, field for field, ClubLog block
included though phase 2 will fill it — a file that round-trips unchanged is the
whole of 'same format', and a test pins it with a real DXHunter entry. Global
(dataDir), not per profile.
CONTEST is per entry, not the global mode DXHunter has: a contest entry is
judged against the current UTC day — the boundary lives in the query's date
bound, so midnight needs no timer and resets nothing. Normal entries read the
same in-memory worked index the alerts use. Prefix matching is why RI0SP
catches RI0SP/MM, pinned by test.
Notify goes through the existing alert:fired event — the frontend already
toasts and sounds it — throttled to one alert per entry per two minutes,
because a DXpedition lights every skimmer on the planet.
Tab wired like NET Control: opt-in from Tools, persisted, closable. Single
click fills the callsign, double click works the spot — the cluster's own
gesture, kept.
The My-station group covered nineteen fields and not the three numeric ones.
They take their own integer path rather than the generic text setter: the
columns are nullable integers, and while SQLite would coerce '14' quietly, a
shared MySQL logbook would not — and empty must become NULL, never ''. Bounds
checked (DXCC <1000, CQ 1-40, ITU 1-90) so a slip cannot stamp zone 400 across
a thousand rows.
'None of the consoles look alike' is the complaint ShiftRow exists to answer,
and the Elecraft panel was still driving its offset with a row of nudge buttons.
It now uses the shared control — ±, wheel, typed value — plus the same
Ctrl+←/→ 10 Hz clarifier the Icom and TCI panels have. The K3 keeps ONE offset
for RIT and XIT, so both rows show it, exactly like the Icom's.
The backend gains the absolute setter the shared control speaks
(SetKenwoodRITOffset, funnelled through the same RO write as the nudge), and
the power slider moves in 1 W steps — nobody asks a K3 for 'between 10 and 15
watts' in fives.
Also per review: the chase switches are labelled 'Chase POTA' / 'Chase SOTA',
matching 'Chase new grids' beside them.
An operator who does not chase parks does not want NEW POTA shouting from every
activator spot. Two switches (Settings → DX Cluster, on by default): off, the
marker is withdrawn at the display layer — applySpotDisplay, the same chokepoint
the grid, the band map and the filter read through — so the badge, the colour,
the filter chip and the reference column all go quiet together, and a new-band +
new-POTA spot reads NEW BAND alone. The facts keep being computed; only the
telling stops, so ticking the box back on needs no rescan.
Per review: the digital-grouping sentence on the same-slot option, the
spot-lifetime explanation, the ring-buffer paragraph on the spots-kept field,
and the free-public-nodes line all go.
rouggy