The map answers "where is the satellite over the earth". This answers
"where do I look", which during a pass is the question that matters.
The projection is the one every tracker uses and every operator already
reads: the centre is the zenith, the rim is the horizon, north is up. So
the radius is (90 − elevation), not the elevation — a bird overhead is a
dot in the middle, and a pass that hugs the rim is one that never rises.
Whether it comes over the roof or along the treeline is something no
amount of azimuth and elevation digits conveys, and one glance settles.
The whole pass is drawn: a dashed track with arrowheads for the direction
of travel, a hollow circle where it rises, a filled one where it sets,
and a cross where the satellite is now — green above the horizon, grey
below, because the numbers are still right down there and nothing can be
worked through the earth.
The track is fetched once a minute, not once a second: the SHAPE of a
pass does not change while it happens. Only the marker moves, and that
rides on the tuning poll that was already running.
Headings, because a column of numbers with nothing above it makes an
operator work out what they are looking at every time. A real table, so
the satellite column takes the width the longest name needs — "ZHUHAI-1
OVS-1A" was cut to eight characters in a fixed one.
Colour where it carries meaning, and nowhere else. The maximum elevation
is the quality of the pass, so it is coloured like one: a bird 70°
overhead and one scraping 12° along the horizon are not the same evening,
and the table should say so without the operator reading every number. A
pass in progress is green, one starting within five minutes is amber. And
a dot for the mode: FM and SSB call for a completely different set-up,
and which the next pass is decides whether you reach for a handheld or
for the whole station.
The rotator's baud rate is a dropdown, like every other one in OpsLog.
Three things reported together from the tab.
The shipped frequency plan went from eleven satellites to twenty-five:
the eight Tevel FM cubesats, EO-88, AO-109, CAS-4A and 4B, TO-108,
GreenCube's single-frequency digipeater, and QO-100's wideband
transponder beside its narrowband one. It remains a starting point in a
file the operator can correct — a transponder gets switched and no
release should be needed to follow it — and the picker still lists every
bird in the element set when the "with a plan" filter is unticked.
The readout column drags to any width between 240 and 720 pixels,
double-clicks back to its default, and folds away entirely. How much map
against how much detail is the operator's call: watching a footprint
cross an ocean and working a pass want opposite things.
And the locator is no longer asked for twice. Passes are predicted from
the station locator, which is set once in Station information; the field
here was only ever for an antenna at another site, so it says so and sits
folded away. Nobody should have to wonder which of two locators is in
use.
Also: "Driven by" is two columns wide. "OpsLog (EasyComm II)" did not fit
in a third of the row, and a truncated choice is a choice that cannot be
read.
The world map and the grid-square map shared a single key, so picking
satellite imagery to look at grids repainted the main map too, and there
was no way to have terrain on one and streets on the other. They are
different maps answering different questions, and the imagery that suits
one is not the imagery that suits the next.
Four keys now, one per map, in lib/mapBase beside the remembered views —
named in one place so a rename cannot silently orphan somebody's choice —
and portable, so a copied data folder brings them along. The grid map
inherits whatever was set under the old shared key rather than being
reset to the default: an operator who chose imagery there keeps it.
It handles azimuth and elevation, and a great many stations already run
it in front of a controller OpsLog has never heard of. For those,
OpsLog talking to the controller itself would be a second program
fighting PstRotator over the same cable — so it hands over the bearing
instead, and lets PstRotator turn the mast.
Both kinds sit behind one small interface, chosen in Settings. Neither is
more correct than the other: the right one is whichever the station
already has working.
The 450° overlap is deliberately NOT applied on the PstRotator path.
PstRotator knows which machine is on the other end and does its own; two
programs each deciding to go the long way round is exactly how an antenna
unwinds in the middle of a pass.
Position queries are asked at most every three seconds rather than on
every tick. A PstRotator query binds a socket and waits up to a second
and a half, and many setups answer nothing at all — so one silence is
enough and it stops asking, reporting the commanded position instead and
saying that is what it is.
Settings ▸ Lists ▸ Satellites is gone. It was a text box an operator
typed their birds into by hand, and it had nothing to do with the
satellites the tracker knew: the same station kept two lists of the same
satellites and they drifted apart. The SAT_NAME box on the entry form now
offers the followed set — or every satellite with a frequency plan when
none is followed — merged with whatever that old list still holds, read
and never written, because what it holds is somebody's past work.
And the satellite section moved out of Hardware, which it never was.
Which birds you chase, where your antenna stands and how old your
elements are is operating; the rotator inside it is the only hardware
there, and one block does not make a section a device.
Two things belong in different places, and they were in one.
Settings → Satellites now holds the setup: which satellites to follow —
the same two-column shape as the awards, for the same reason, since a
feed carries two hundred birds and an operator works six — and the
orbital elements, their age, the fetch, and pasting your own. Following
none still means every satellite with both elements and a frequency plan,
so somebody who has not chosen yet is not handed an empty tab.
The panel keeps only what a pass needs. A countdown to AOS, or to LOS
once it is up, because that is the number that decides whether you sit
down; a bar for where in the pass you are, since mid-pass the useful
question is not the clock but whether you are past the peak; rise, peak
and set with compass directions, because "rises SW" is a direction to
look in and 213° is arithmetic. Distance, altitude and footprint. And
approaching or receding, which is the sign of the whole Doppler
correction and the only thing that explains why the frequencies are
moving the way they are.
The countdowns run in the browser from two timestamps. Predicting a pass
steps the orbit across a day thirty seconds at a time, which is not
something to do once a second for a clock the page can keep itself.
Two things reported together on the new tab.
The locator: the station's is on the ACTIVE PROFILE, not in a settings
key. keyStationMyGrid is a legacy key that EnsureDefault migrated into
the profile long ago and nothing writes any more, so reading it told an
operator with a perfectly good locator on screen that he had not set one
— and refused every pass prediction on the strength of it.
The map: Leaflet stacks its panes and controls up to z-index 1000, which
without a stacking context of their own float over the whole application
— Preferences opened behind the map, its Save and Close buttons under it.
The other three maps in OpsLog each carry `isolate` for exactly this
reason; this one was missing it.
EasyComm is what satellite rotator controllers agreed on, so a box that
works with SatPC32, Gpredict or Hamlib works here. Serial or TCP, and its
own settings rather than the HF rotator's: an az/el pair is a different
machine on a different port, and an operator who has both must not have
to choose.
A great many EasyComm controllers — the Arduino trackers above all —
accept commands and never say a word back. That is legal and common, so a
silent controller is not treated as a broken one: it is still driven, and
the last commanded position is reported in its place, marked as commanded
rather than read. A stuck rotator must not be able to hide behind an
order it never carried out, which is why the panel shows the antenna's
position beside the satellite's.
The 450° overlap is the reason a satellite rotator is worth having, so it
is used: a pass crossing north continues past 360 instead of unwinding
three quarters of a turn with the antenna sweeping the ground. Below the
configured elevation the mast is left alone — the numbers are right all
the way round the orbit, but a rotator that chases a satellite through
the far side of the earth spends the night turning, and a mast has a
finite number of turns in it.
The hard part of satellite tuning is not the arithmetic, it is deciding
who owns the dial. A tracker that forces both frequencies fights the
operator every time they turn the knob to follow a station across a
linear transponder; one that never touches the receiver leaves them
chasing a signal that slides nine kilohertz across a 70 cm pass.
So the operator owns the receiver and the tracker follows them. Every
second it asks the radio where the receiver actually is. Where it put it,
nothing has changed. Further than a dial-turn's tolerance, and the
operator has chosen a station: what they landed on is converted back into
a nominal frequency, and the transmitter is derived from that. Which is
the division of labour on a linear bird — the operator listens, the radio
does the sums.
Three ways to reach the radio, because a satellite pair is a shape of
operating rather than a manufacturer's feature. An IC-9700 or IC-9100 is
asked for its OWN satellite mode: it pairs main and sub, gives full
duplex, and keeps the dials linked the way its designers meant, which is
always better than an imitation built out of split. A Flex gets two
slices, A the downlink and B the uplink, created when missing, because
"slice B does not exist" is not something to make an operator fix at the
start of a ten-minute pass. Everything else gets the downlink, and is
told so — half the job announced beats half the job hidden.
What goes in the log is the NOMINAL pair. Two stations working each other
through a transponder read different numbers off their dials at the same
instant; the only figure they can both agree on is the transponder's own.
FREQ is the uplink and FREQ_RX the downlink — the one place a satellite
QSO differs from every other kind, and the reason FREQ alone cannot
describe one.
Three questions answered at once, because on a pass there is no time to
go looking for any of them: where the bird is, when the next one comes,
and what to tune. The map draws each satellite's footprint — the honest
answer to "can I hear it", since everything inside the circle has the
satellite above its horizon — and the selected one's path over the
ground. The pass list is every favourite in time order, the one in
progress in green.
The readout shows the corrected frequency large and the nominal one
beneath it. Only one of them, and an operator cannot tell a Doppler
correction from a mistuned transponder.
The map opens on the station rather than the Atlantic, and remembers
where it was left like the others. The panel is mounted only while its
tab is visible: it asks for the tuning once a second, and there is no
reason to compute an orbit nobody is looking at.
What internal/sat could not know: where the antenna is, which birds the
operator cares about, and where the files live.
Startup reads the cached elements and the frequency plan from disk and
nothing else — one file and a few hundred parses, so the tab is full the
moment it is opened, on a shack PC with no internet as much as on one
with. Fetching is the slow, optional half and never blocks a launch; it
happens on its own only when the set is stale and the operator asked for
it.
Elements pasted in by hand go in their own file. The feed cache is
replaced wholesale on every refresh, so a freshly launched satellite —
whose elements circulate on a mailing list days before any feed carries
it, which is exactly the week everybody wants to hear it — would
otherwise be wiped by the first automatic update.
The list joins both halves and shows what is missing on either side. A
bird with elements and no plan is one the operator can still track; a
bird with a plan and no elements is the visible symptom of an element set
that is too old. Dropping either turns a fixable configuration problem
into a satellite that "does not exist".
GetSatelliteTuning is the working answer, and everything that will later
drive a radio is built on top of it rather than beside it, so the display
and the rig can never disagree. It keeps the operator's frequency
nominal and applies Doppler only on the way out: on a linear pass the
station being answered stays put on the dial while both radios chase the
shift. A geostationary bird is corrected by nothing at all.
The selector row appears above the dial when there is more than one
rotor, and the widget's height is not its own to take — it sits in a
strip sized by the entry form beside it. The row was simply added, so the
SP/LP pair and half the Stop button went off the end.
The dial (24 px), the three button rows (8 px each) and the padding
(4 px) now give that height back between them, which is a selector row
almost exactly. The dial and the controls column stay the same height as
each other, so the two columns still line up.
His log settles the 28.074 case: "SetCATFrequency 28.074 MHz" and the
state still reads mode=USB — nothing sent a mode, so the rig simply
stayed where it was. A spot click has always carried one; a frequency
typed by hand carried none. It now uses the same table and the same
tolerance as a spot (±3 kHz of a known FT8/FT4/JS8 frequency), and only
towards the digital modes: tuning AWAY from one leaves the mode alone,
because there the frequency says nothing about what the operator means.
RTTY on Yaesu is a choice the log cannot make: ADIF records "RTTY" and
the rig has MD06 (RTTY-L) and MD09 (RTTY-U). The older lower sideband
stays the default and a station whose FSK controller wants the upper one
says so once in Settings → CAT.
The main hint named three fixed colours, which stopped being true the
moment the operator could choose them. And the paragraph under "Mark
stations already worked" explained a trade-off nobody reads standing at
the radio; the switch says what it does.
The transmit gag starts when the move is commanded; the indicator waited
for a status poll to say the elements were travelling, so the two
disagreed by a second or more — and on an automatic follow (band change
with tracking on) there was no sign at all until a poll landed. The
backend now announces the order as it goes out, the interface shows it at
once and re-reads the antenna immediately, and the real status takes over
the moment it arrives.
The WSJT-X "grey out stations already worked" switch is renamed "Mark
stations already worked": with the colour now chosen by the operator the
old name described the wrong thing, but the switch still answers a
question the palette cannot — WHETHER dupes should be marked at all. On a
well-filled log they are most of a period, and a window where nearly
every line is coloured has stopped saying anything.
The motorised antenna gagged the transmitter for a second or two after it
had finished moving. Three delays were stacked: the antenna polled every
two seconds, the gag held for three after the command whatever the
antenna said, and the widget refreshed every three. The antenna is now
asked four times a second WHILE IT MOVES — an idle one has nothing to say
and stays at two seconds — the gag only bridges the command itself
(900 ms), and the widget follows at half a second while moving.
WSJT-X highlighting:
- A watch-list station already worked on this band and mode is no longer
painted as one to call. The list is a statement of intent, not of what
is left to do, and its pink outranked every other verdict including the
log's, so a worked station stayed pink for the session with nothing to
tell it from one still needed.
- The four colours are the operator's to choose (Settings → UDP). Only
the background: the text colour is derived by luma, so a dark blue
cannot come back as black-on-black in somebody else's window. Changing
one clears the installed highlights, or the de-duplication would keep
showing yesterday's colour until a callsign changed verdict.
The square ring put the ticks in the corners where the room is, and made
every distance from the centre depend on direction — a marker at 45 sat
further out than one at north. A dial is read by angle, so the ring it is
read against is the same distance away all the way round now, and the
markers need one radius instead of a per-direction one.
The antenna is a sector that fades outwards rather than an arrow: an
antenna does not look along a line, it looks through a lobe, and the
arrow claimed a precision the beamwidth does not have. Where the mouse
would send it is drawn the same way, and its azimuth cross-fades into the
big readout while aiming — the figure is read at the moment the beam is,
so it belongs in the same place rather than somewhere to look away to.
Three colours, three meanings, kept apart: green where the antenna IS
(as everywhere else in OpsLog), orange where a click would send it,
yellow what was ORDERED. His revision drew all of them orange and yellow,
which loses the distinction the dial exists for — and drew the second
lobe of a bidirectional Ultrabeam at full strength, indistinguishable
from the main one. It is dimmed again; the dashed boom, the REV/BI badge
and the compact form are untouched.
From an operator's log: an IC-7760 in standby, and OpsLog dialling and
dropping every forty seconds for as long as it was left there — control
link up, login OK, token renewed, and not one CI-V answer.
lastGoodAt bounds "the link answers but no CI-V comes back". It belongs
to a session and was never cleared when a new one opened, so a rig that
went to standby half an hour ago handed every fresh session a
half-hour-old last good read: past the grace before the first command was
even sent. Torn down at once, redialled twenty seconds later, torn down
again. Cleared on connect, the rule reads as it was written — silent
since connect is a rig in standby, and the session is kept so it can be
woken.
The console it is woken from was missing too. It appeared only once the
live CAT state said "icom", which a sleeping rig never says, so the ON
button was absent at the one moment it exists for. It now follows the
CONFIGURED radio — which also had to start following a radio switched
from the status bar, instead of waiting for a trip through Settings and a
Save that changed nothing.
The invisible circle that catches the clicks sits ON TOP of the dot, so
it takes the hover as well — and the tooltip was bound only to the dot
underneath. From the moment the stations became clickable, pointing at
one said nothing: the callsign, square and report an operator reads off
the map had simply gone.
The map draws a dot per decoded station and they did nothing. They now
answer the same two gestures as the decodes list, because the two are
views of the same list and a click has to mean the same thing on both:
one takes the callsign into the entry (and points the PSK Reporter panel
at it), two answer it.
The handlers were written inline on the list, so the map could not offer
them without a second copy — they are named once now and given to both.
Leaflet leaves the telling apart of click and dblclick to the handler, an
invisible marker three times the dot's radius takes the clicks (a
three-pixel dot is a fine mark and a poor target), and the double click
is stopped rather than merely unpropagated: the map zooms on one, and
answering a station is not a request to zoom in on it.
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 world map was the only one that remembered anything. Panning and
zooming a map is the operator saying which part of the world they work,
and on the FT decodes map and the grid-square map that was thrown away on
every tab switch. Both now keep centre and zoom, through one shared
helper (lib/mapView) that the world map uses too, and the keys are
portable so a copied data folder brings the views with it.
The world map also waits for the station's square before it paints. It
drew the world at 0 degrees and then moved to the operator's longitude —
a screenful of Esri tiles fetched and discarded on every first run. It is
now built once, knowing where it is looking; a profile with no locator
gets the default view after two seconds rather than a blank panel.
Centred on 0 degrees it left an Australian looking at their own country
in the bottom-right corner, with the paths to everywhere they work
running off both edges. Centred on their own longitude the same map reads
the way their antenna does: the Americas to the east, Europe and Africa
to the west. Leaflet repeats the world horizontally, so this is a choice
of viewpoint and costs nothing — the tiles either side are the same
world, and unwrapLon already draws the arcs across the seam.
The latitude is damped rather than followed (a station at 69 north
centred on itself would spend half the map on the Arctic), the station's
square arrives after the map is built so it re-centres once when it
lands, and a view the operator has panned to themselves still wins.
An operator with a callsign in the field, switching FT8 to SSB, kept
"+00" as the report. The edited flag protects a report the operator
chose — 57 rather than 59 — and it was holding across a change of mode as
well, where it protects nothing: a decibel figure is not a weak SSB
report, it is not a report at all. Worse, anything that fills the field
from the rig sets that flag too (the S-meter readouts in the rig
consoles), so the field could be stuck in the wrong notation for the rest
of the QSO.
The flag now holds only while the report still belongs to the mode's
family. When it does not, the operator's own judgement is carried across
where it can be — 57 becomes 579, 599 becomes 59 — and the mode's preset
answers where it cannot.
Below 59+20 comes 59+15, then +10, +5, then a plain 59 and down through
58, 57. Stepping the S digit and leaving the suffix where it was turned
59+20 into 58+20, which nobody has ever said on the air. Five decibels at
a time above S9 — the same increment sMeterRST rounds an S-meter reading
to — and one S-unit below it.
The mouse wheel steps the RST fields — one S-unit on an RST or RS, one
decibel on a digital report, up for a better one — in the entry strip and
in the QSO editor. The dropdown beside them lists the reports worth
having to hand, not all 41 decibels, so the wheel works on the value
rather than walking the list. The listener is native and non-passive:
React attaches onWheel passively, where preventDefault does nothing and
the panel scrolls away under the field being adjusted.
PSK Reporter, whole-band scope: clicking a decode reset the report count
to zero. The window there is the BAND's — every FTx report on it,
filtered by target only when the analysis is drawn — and it was emptied
on every target change, throwing away an hour of evidence at the moment
the operator asked the question it answers. The narrow scope still clears
it: there the window is one station's, and keeping it would answer the
new question with the old station's evidence.
ZD8GB — watch-listed, six streams a period, two of them RR73 — was
refused as "parked" for the rest of the session. Parking answers "it
will not answer, stop wasting the evening on it", which is a fair verdict
about a station the LOG picked out and the wrong one about a station the
OPERATOR named: a DXpedition running a pileup takes more than two series
of calls to get through to, which is exactly why it is on the list. The
rest between series still applies, so it cannot monopolise the
transmitter — it simply never becomes ineligible.
Send to (right-click) now refuses a service with no credentials and says
which are missing. The upload runs on its own goroutine and reports into
the QSL Manager's console, which is not open when the command came from
the QSO list, so an upload to an unconfigured service looked exactly like
one that worked. The toast is also raised only once the backend has
accepted the request, and Cloudlog / Wavelog and HamQTH name themselves
in it.
Three field reports.
Icom CI-V address 00 could not be kept: zero was read as "not
configured" in all three places that validate it, so every save put the
rig back to the IC-7610's 0x98 — and the model dropdown followed, since
it is derived from the address rather than stored. Picking "Other
(custom address)" also had no effect of its own: the list re-derived
itself and snapped back to whatever rig matched. It now stays chosen.
Cloudlog/Wavelog showed "17m/17m" on ordinary FT8 contacts (OE6CLD).
Every QSO is stamped with a receive side equal to the transmit side, and
the uploaded record carried it; Wavelog draws band/band_rx whenever both
are there. In ADIF an absent BAND_RX means "same as transmit", so the
uploaded record now writes the receive side only when it differs. The
copy forwarded to another logger over UDP keeps writing it in full —
that is why it was stamped in the first place (Log4OM reads BAND_RX) —
through its own ForwardRecordADIF.
"S/F" in a spot comment joins superfox / sfox / F-H as FT8.
Callsign, band, mode, badge, age in reading order, and the widget widened
to 290 px so the badge and the age never squeeze the callsign. Two lines
made the panel twice as tall for the same three facts; the entry that
matched — which only differs when it is a prefix — moved into the row's
tooltip.
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.
The Wails boundary for the two features above, plus the pieces that
belong to neither:
- decodes are cut into periods PER RECEIVER, and judged 0.8 s after the
last one arrives rather than a slot and four seconds after the period
they belong to. That stamp is the START of the slot, thirteen seconds
before its decodes exist, so every answer left four seconds into the
next slot and the decoder began its call late.
- WSJT-X colouring can grey out a station already worked on this band
AND in this mode. Its own switch, off by default: the other three
verdicts pick out a handful of decodes, this one can match most of a
period on a full log.
- the watch list's contest auto-add takes a list of callsigns as well
as a pattern. A pattern collects a fleet that shares a string; it
cannot collect the station taking part under a callsign that says
nothing about the event.
Clicking one tuned the rig and zoomed the panadapter, and stopped there:
no mode on the entry, no RST preset, no park or summit reference, and —
the one that matters — no word to the decoding application. So picking
an FT4 station from Chase new while WSJT-X sat in FT8 left it decoding
FT8, which defeats the only thing the window is for.
It goes through handleSpotClick now rather than repeating a chosen half
of it, so the two can never drift apart again. The mode is handed over
where a cluster line would carry it in its comment, which is where that
handler looks for it.
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.
The one configured service the upload menu did not offer. Not because it
uploads one record at a time — QRZ, HAMLOG.online and HamQTH all do —
but because Cloudlog keeps no per-QSO sent status, on purpose: it
dedupes server-side, so re-sending is harmless and nothing has to be
remembered. The menu had been built around that status.
An explicit selection needs none of it. The operator picked the rows,
and the server refuses what it already has — which is exactly why the
missing column stops mattering the moment a human is choosing.
A list whose rows can only be moved by a sixteen-pixel grip is a list
most people conclude cannot be moved at all. The grip stays as the sign
that it can, and the row itself now carries the gesture — plus a line on
the edge the row would take, because the question a dragging hand asks
is 'between which two', which a highlighted target does not answer.
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.
rouggy