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.
Withdrawing auto-call added a runtime guard and removed every control.
The stored preference was left alone, so 'enabled: true' still sits in
localStorage on the machines that had it on -- and any build without the
guard reads it and keys the transmitter for a feature that no longer has
a switch anywhere in the interface.
loadAutoCall now switches it off and writes it back the first time it
reads it, so the disarming survives a downgrade or a reinstall. Also
drops the dead auto-call state left behind in the settings modal.
A withdrawn feature that keys a radio has to be disarmed where it is
remembered, not only where it runs.
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.
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.
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 COM port was a bare text field — the only serial device in the app without
a port list, and typing one by hand gave no clue when it failed.
A Combobox rather than the Select the other devices use, deliberately: the port
of a USB adapter that is not plugged in does not appear in any list, and
refusing a typed value would mean the antenna cannot be configured until the
adapter is in. Detected ports are offered, anything else is still accepted, and
the value is trimmed and upper-cased on the way in.
The failure itself was already logged by the SteppIR client ("cannot open COM7
@ 4800 baud"); what was missing was the line above it not claiming the antenna
had connected. That is fixed separately.
Carries the 0.26.2 changelog entries for this and the three preceding commits —
one file, and splitting it four ways would have said less than this does.
Three faults an operator's log finally made visible, plus the interface
work that came out of the same session.
Reliability:
- UDP events were dropped on backpressure without a word. A period hands
over twenty-odd decodes at once, and one slow write to the radio was
enough to fill the queue — so a decode simply never appeared, and the
only detector was the operator comparing the panel with JTDX. The drop
is now counted and logged, panadapter spots went to their own goroutine
so the radio can no longer hold the decode stream up, and the queue is
deep enough for a full period.
- The CAT manager waited for its poll loop with a bare <-done. A loop
wedged in a serial read then blocked every later restart inside Start,
before it could even try to connect: the rig stayed dead, no line was
written anywhere, and only killing the process recovered it. The wait
is bounded at ten seconds and says what it abandoned and why the next
connect may fail.
- Shutdown had no logging at all, so a hang left nothing to go on and a
process the operator had to kill — which then blocked the restart after
an update. Every step is logged, and a watchdog forces the exit if one
of them never returns.
Auto-call:
- A QSO in progress is now held by OpsLog itself rather than inferred
from the sender's Status. The moment WSJT-X/JTDX dropped the DX call or
the Enable-Tx flag between overs, the exchange looked finished and the
next CQ was answered, interleaving two and then three QSOs on one
slice. Released on log, on halt, on taking over, and by a watchdog.
Cluster console:
- Replies to a command were buried under the spot flood; a Replies
toggle hides the DX spots, which the list above already shows.
- Twelve named command buttons beside the input, configured in
Settings -> Cluster; a button with no command is not drawn.
- Following the tail is now an explicit switch, and sending a command
re-arms it. It used to measure "am I at the bottom" AFTER committing
the new lines, so a ten-line reply looked like the operator had
scrolled up and was never followed — the one case it exists for.
Awards:
- An award can name NO field. The matching controls disappear with it
and only hand-assigned references count, which is the only thing that
can feed a reference like WWBOTA. A test pins that nothing else is
scanned.
- WWBOTA added to the catalogue with its 31 342 references.
Elsewhere: the rotor widget's Stop button acknowledges the press like
the direction presets already did, and the docked band map can be
switched to fit-to-band from its own header.
It joins the left/right dropdowns in Settings -> General alongside the maps,
the cluster and the rest, so decodes can sit beside the entry strip instead
of only behind a tab. Per-profile like the other pane choices.
The panel itself is now built in ONE place and rendered from both: two
copies of that call would be two sets of props to keep in step, and the
click handler in particular is not something to duplicate.
The status refresh follows. Its "is anything showing a spot status?" test
decides whether a logged QSO refreshes the NEW badges now or only marks
them dirty, and a panel that had become a pane would have gone on wearing
stale badges whenever it was shown that way rather than as a tab.
Wanted for the case where the answers are moving: an operator correcting their
own QRZ record, or chasing a DXpedition whose page changes during the operation,
otherwise waits out thirty days before OpsLog will ask again. Clearing the cache
by hand works once; this is the setting for a whole session.
Nothing is read from it and nothing is written to it — rows stored while it is
off would only sit there going stale, waiting for the day it comes back on.
Switching off is NOT clearing: what it already holds stays, and the Clear cache
button remains the way to throw that away.
Two distinctions the code now has to keep, both load-bearing:
An EXPLICIT stored zero is off; an ABSENT key is the thirty-day default. Every
operator who has never opened this setting has nothing stored, and reading that
blank as a zero would silently switch the cache off for all of them.
The CONSTRUCTOR's zero is still the default, not off. At startup the settings
have not been read yet, and beginning with no cache would hammer the provider
for the first seconds of every launch. Only SetTTL, called once the operator's
settings are known, can switch it off.
A negative lifetime is meaningless and is ignored rather than rounded into
either meaning.
The input had to change too: it derived its value from the stored number on
every keystroke, so the box could not be emptied — and 0 was unreachable
outright, since parseInt('0') || 30 is 30.
internal/rigctld exists because Windows gives a COM port to ONE process: the
moment OpsLog talks to the radio natively, nothing else can. It answers the
programs that speak Hamlib NET rigctl. This answers the ones built around Expert
Electronics' TCI instead — and it answers them whatever radio is connected,
because it sits on the same backend-agnostic Rig interface. An operator with an
Icom or a Yaesu can now hand a TCI-only program a working rig.
One server or the other, never both. They answer the same questions about the
same radio, nothing speaks both, and a second listener is only a second thing to
go wrong.
Written against the official TCI Protocol document (ExpertSDR3/TCI, 12 January
2024, MIT — downloaded and read, not recalled): the initialisation set of §4.1
in its documented order, and the argument order of every command from §4.2. A
client will not proceed past connect without that block, which is why it is
written out in full rather than stubbed.
The one dangerous detail is the VFO mapping. TCI's channel A is where you
LISTEN and channel B where you transmit — the opposite way round from OpsLog's
RigState, which follows ADIF. Getting that backwards would put a station on the
DX's own frequency, so it is pinned in both directions by a test, and RxFreq was
added to the adapter rather than inferred.
Writing channel B while the rig is simplex is ignored: the client asked to
prepare a split transmit frequency, not to QSY, and a logger doing that on every
spot click would drag the operator off the station they were listening to. A
backend that cannot split still refuses out loud.
Only changes are pushed. TCI clients redraw on each command, so re-sending an
unchanged frequency four times a second makes a VFO readout flicker and fights
the operator's own tuning.
Nine tests, no socket needed — the protocol is the decision, not the transport.
The three layers underneath were already there and unreachable: the change-log
format (7d664bd), the identity column (724e68b) and the no-backfill decision
(c48294b). This is the wiring that gives the operator a switch.
Settings, all profile-scoped, because each profile can point at its own logbook:
the folder, this PC's name, the machine id minted once from it, the per-peer read
offsets and the tie-break counter. Scoping the machine id is what keeps two
profiles sharing one folder from writing two logbooks into one file.
Three hooks. Add and update publish asynchronously, down with the rest of the
after-the-fact work — a folder on a network share can block for seconds and a
contact belongs on screen long before another machine hears about it. Deletion
publishes SYNCHRONOUSLY and BEFORE the row goes, for the same reason
deleteRemoteCopies does: once it is gone its identity is gone with it and the
tombstone names nothing.
The apply path uses the repository directly and never AddQSO/UpdateQSO/DeleteQSO
— those publish, and a change applied here would be written straight back out,
two machines echoing each other for ever.
Saving writes a probe file to the chosen folder rather than asking whether it
exists. A read-only cloud folder, or a share whose credentials expired, exists
perfectly well and would swallow every contact in silence; if the probe fails the
switch goes back off instead of sitting on while nothing is written.
The panel is mostly status, and deliberately: every part of this runs on another
machine and on a sync client OpsLog cannot see, so "it is not working" has to be
answerable from the settings page — which PCs are in the folder, when each last
logged, what is waiting unread.
Four tests on the apply path, the middle two being the ones that matter: an edit
made on the other PC lands on the copy already here, matched on the contact
itself, instead of becoming a second row — that is what makes the no-backfill
decision safe — and a contact with the same station on another band stays a
separate contact.
The four buttons on the left change WHICH settings database is in use; the two
on the right act on the file already there. Splitting them by that line makes
the row read as two groups instead of six equal choices, and it stops the pair
wrapping to a ragged second line under the others.
ml-auto rather than a second container, so they still wrap gracefully when the
panel is narrow.
Also removed: "OpsLog can copy the SQLite database to a folder of your choice
when you close it, once per day. Rotation keeps the last N copies…" — everyone
knows what a backup is, and the controls underneath say the same thing in their
own labels. Gone from both dictionaries, and the bilingual test passes.
Text only — every feature stays exactly as it was.
gen.mwDesc what a Most Wanted rank is
bk.hintMysql what the on-close backup does with a MySQL logbook
db.profileHint that the logbook follows the active profile
db.mysqlHint that several OpsLogs on one MySQL see each other live
They explained things an operator already knows, in a settings panel that has
plenty to read as it is. The backup header keeps its ordinary hint; only the
longer MySQL variant goes.
Each removed from BOTH dictionaries: a string left in one and dropped from the
other shows the bare key in the other language, which is what
TestEveryStringIsInBothLanguages exists to catch — and it passes.
A field log showed three pulls of the same 123 615 QSOs inside ten seconds, the
Go heap going 725 MB → 2213 MB → 2539 MB. It is released after the idle TTL, so
not a leak — just the same work done three times with all three results alive at
once.
The cache lock was released before the logbook was read, so every caller that
arrived during a build missed the cache and started its own. Opening the Awards
panel does exactly that. One builder at a time now, with the usual re-check
after taking the lock: the second and third caller wait out the seconds they
were going to spend anyway, minus two round trips to the database.
The slice is also sized from the previous build. Growing to 123 000 structs by
doubling copies the whole thing a dozen times and holds the old and the new
array together at each step, on the largest object OpsLog keeps.
Also, the settings panel registry. The hook trap that broke the window when the
power-supply panel was opened was headed off by a comment, and the comment did
not survive contact with the next panel — so it is now structural. PanelHost is
a module-scope component that calls the selected panel and is keyed by section:
hooks inside a panel land in a component context that persists, section changes
remount it so each gets a fresh and consistent hook list, and no panel state
leaks into the next.
Rendering the panels as <Panel /> instead — the obvious refactor — would have
been wrong: they are nested inside SettingsModal and close over its state, so
each parent render makes a new component TYPE and React would unmount and
remount the panel on every keystroke.
Field report from a tower: on a RAK/RAU in Rot1Prog, every commanded heading
made the antenna want to turn nearly a full circle ANTICLOCKWISE — 0°, 90°, any
of them — while the heading readout, the stop button and everything else worked.
BuildSet framed the four-digit Rot2Prog azimuth for both dialects. A Rot1Prog
reads three: its replies are three digits in a five-byte frame, and its command
field matches. So 90° went out as "0450" and was read as 045 — 45 − 360 = −315°.
Every target landed 360° low, which is why it was always anticlockwise and
always nearly a full turn. The operator's own guess, that OpsLog was in 720°
mode, was the right instinct in the wrong place: the fault is a decimal shift,
not a range.
The round-trip test added here is the one that would have caught it without a
tower — every degree of the circle through the command builder and back through
the reply parser, which must return the degree that went in. The frame tests
pinned the Rot2Prog form against the reference and said nothing about the other
dialect.
Two more from the same report. A rotator test that only READS the heading — SPID,
ARCO, DCU-1 — said "Packet sent, the antenna should swing to north, check
PstRotator's UDP listener", naming a program not in the path for a move never
commanded; it now says the controller answered and nothing was moved. And the
compass polled every three seconds, so a turning antenna moved the needle in
steps of about thirteen degrees; the heading now has its own 700 ms tick while
the relay boards and the antenna controller stay at three seconds.
It held a useState and a useEffect of its own, and the panels in that registry
are called as plain functions — PANELS[x]() — not rendered as elements. So its
hooks landed in SettingsModal's own hook list, and only while that section was
open: React counted more hooks than the render before and stopped drawing the
whole window (error #310).
The file says so three lines above the entry I added, on the two panels that DO
carry hooks and are therefore wrapped in JSX. Reading it would have been quicker
than the screenshot.
No hook here now. The COM ports come from the list SettingsModal already loads
when it opens, for the Winkeyer panel — one machine, one set of serial ports,
fetched once instead of twice.
The manufacturer's document arrived, so this is no longer guesswork: 9600 8N1,
function codes 03 and 06 only, and a register map with the output on/off at
0x0001, the measurements at 0x0010…0x0013 and the set points at 0x0030/0x0031.
ONE REGISTER IS WRITTEN — 0x0001, the output. The map also exposes the voltage
and current set points and the three protection trip levels as writable, and
none of them belong to a logbook: a wrong value there is 30 V where a radio
expected 13.8, or a trip level lifted on a supply feeding an amplifier. They are
read and displayed instead, next to the measured values, which is also how an
operator sees at a glance that the supply is on and the radio is drawing nothing.
The wire layer is tested where it can be. CRC-16/MODBUS is pinned against its
published check value — the CRC of "123456789" is 0x4B37 — which fixes the
polynomial, the initial value, the reflection and the absence of a final xor all
at once; the rest of the protocol is checked frame by frame against the manual,
including the byte order of the CRC, an exception reply told apart from a broken
line, and a reply from another slave on the bus refused. The write echo must
match the value sent: it is the only confirmation the output really switched,
and accepting the frame without it is how a radio ends up dark behind a green
light.
Framing follows the manual's own rules: 3.5 character times of silence between
frames (4 ms at 9600), and a frame is over when the line falls quiet — Modbus
RTU has no terminator, and a serial read that times out returns (0, nil) here,
so the reader is built on a deadline and a quiet-time rather than on an error
that never comes.
Untested against hardware — nobody here has the supply.
An operator with a tower at each end and an AlfaSpid on both wanted OpsLog to
talk to them directly. Multiple rotors were already there; the missing half was
the protocol.
Rot2Prog and Rot1Prog, over the controller's own COM port. The byte layout is
in the package doc and pinned by table tests against Hamlib's spid.c, the
reference implementation — including the one trap this protocol has: digits go
out as ASCII and come back as raw bytes. Send raw and the controller ignores
you; read as ASCII and every heading is wrong by a constant nobody would
recognise as such.
Two things the UI has to get right because they cannot be detected: the dialect
(different reply length AND baud rate) and the baud list, which for a SPID is
600 or 1200 — offering the usual 4800-and-up would have left the controller
permanently mute. Both are handled: picking SPID sets serial transport, 600
baud and Rot2Prog, and the baud dropdown changes to the rates these use.
The connection test reads a status rather than moving anything, so a wrong
dialect shows up there as a reply of the wrong length instead of as an antenna
that behaves oddly an hour later.
Untested against real hardware — I have none. The frames are pinned; the
controller is the only thing that can confirm the rest.
The selector offered 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 and none of them took: the board stayed
at four relays.
The count is decided in three places — deviceRelayCount in Go, chanCount in the
Station Control panel, relayCountUI in Settings. The new type was added to the
first and the dropdown, and to neither of the others, so the panel resized the
labels from a helper that had never heard of it and fell straight through to
its fixed default. The Go side was right the whole time, which is why the
driver would have been built correctly for a count the operator could not set.
All three now know the type. A test pins the Go side against every count the
dropdown offers, and against the fixed boards, whose hardware decides and which
must keep ignoring the field.
"sent 1153 bytes to 127.0.0.1:2250" and nothing in Logger32. Both true: the
line the operator screenshotted is titled "Setup additional WSJT/JTDX UDP
sockets", and those receivers take UDP LOGGING PACKETS — the WSJT-X v2
protocol. A bare ADIF record posted to them is dropped without a word.
So there is a new outbound service rather than a change to the existing one:
"WSJT-X logged QSO (Logger32)" sends the same ADIF wrapped in a Logged ADIF
datagram (magic 0xadbccbda, schema 2, type 12), defaulting to port 2250. The
plain-text row stays for JTAlert/GridTracker-style receivers, because the two
really are different wire formats and one row cannot be both.
The id string is "OpsLog", not "WSJT-X": a receiver uses it to tell instances
apart, and impersonating the real thing would make a second WSJT-X
indistinguishable from us.
Tested both ways — the header byte for byte, and a round trip back through our
own ParseWSJT, since that is the same decoding every receiver applies.
Sahara moves to the parchment an operator asked for: page #e6ded0, panels
#f3eee2, toolbars #ded5c4, terracotta #c4501e on the buttons and the focus
ring. Lighter and less saturated than the deep sand it was.
PSK Reporter tells you what is actually being decoded in your region, which
is a larger set than what somebody chose to spot: nobody spots the FT8 caller
running ten watts from a rare square.
Almost all of it existed. The MQTT payload already carries frequency, mode,
transmitter and both grids; the watcher already drops any report collected
further than NearKm from the operator, which is exactly the question worth
asking — the station is being heard HERE, not in Japan; and with grid chasing
on the subscription is already every band, filtered at the broker by receiver
square, measured at 0.2 to 1.2 messages a second. This reads messages that
were arriving and being discarded.
"New" is not decided here. Every spot goes through ClusterSpotStatuses, the
same function the DX cluster grid uses and the same cached index, so the two
panels cannot drift apart the way the county columns did. Cost per message is
map lookups behind an option cached in an atomic, because the MQTT goroutine
must never wait on the settings store.
The option is its own, not nested under grid chasing: chasing squares and
chasing entities are different wants, and the feed now has three consumers,
any one of which brings it up and none of which cuts the others loose when it
goes down.
The panel says "digital modes only" in its footer. An empty list has to mean
"nothing new on FT8/FT4/JS8 near you", not "the band is dead" — it will never
show a new entity on CW.
The comment came out "SSB WAC EU WAZ 15 WPX HA5" — the QSO's materialised
award_refs hold both kinds, and I took them all. Those four are what every
reader of the spot derives from the callsign in their head. They spent the
whole 30-character comment saying nothing and buried SOTA HA/KM-018, the one
reference anyone would have acted on.
Computed awards are now filtered out with the same rule the QSO editor uses
(isComputedAwardField), which is why they are the ones it lists on the left
and not in its read-only panel. The field map moves from a ref to state as
well: a ref left the first spot of a session computing before GetAwardDefs
had answered.
Also opens 0.25.2, since 0.25.1 shipped before the spot work, and sets the
default mode list to SSB, CW, FT8, FT4, FT2, RTTY, PSK31, FM. AM and
DIGITALVOICE stay in the catalogue but are no longer selected on a fresh
install. FT2 joins the digital family everywhere its siblings are listed —
report list, RST defaults, Flex power class — so it gets dB reports rather
than the 59 an unknown mode falls back to.
The K3NG entry added an hour ago is gone. It named one clone among many —
WKmini, home-built Arduinos, unbranded boxes — for hardware that speaks
exactly the same protocol, and it was the only line in the engine list that
picked a boot delay rather than a protocol. An operator with an unlabelled
clone would have had to guess.
The delay is now learnt per port. The first connect finds out by failing the
quick attempt and succeeding on the slow one; that fact is written to a
global setting keyed by the port, and every connect afterwards goes straight
to the slow attempt. Global rather than per profile on purpose: which keyer
is plugged into COM3 belongs to the computer, and switching profiles for a
different rig does not change the keyer on the desk.
Two tests hold the contract from both sides — a slow keyer must be reported
as slow, and a keyer that answers at once must not be, or every K1EL connect
would inherit seconds it never needed.
The operator's keyer is a K3NG — an Arduino running an emulation of the
WinKeyer protocol — which changes the diagnosis and nearly broke it.
Checked against K3NG's own source before anything else, because yesterday's
handshake now FAILS a connect where it used to press on regardless. It is
safe: k3ng_keyer.ino implements admin echo (0x04) and echoes the byte back,
0x13 is a documented no-op, and OPTION_WINKEY_STRICT_HOST_OPEN — on by
default — ignores every byte except 0x00 before host open, so the resync
nulls are dropped harmlessly and the echo probe still gets through.
The real cause is in K3NG's options file, beside the feature itself:
"disabling Automatic Software Reset is highly recommended", and an option
to "discard errant serial port bytes at startup" for when it is not. On an
Arduino, DTR is wired to reset through a capacitor: opening the port reboots
the board into its bootloader. Ours spoke 400 ms later, to a keyer that was
not running yet.
So the retry now waits 2.5 s, which recovers it without an operator pressing
connect twice, and the engine list gains a K3NG entry that skips the doomed
fast attempt altogether. Everything else is identical to a K1EL — same
settings panel, same protocol.
An operator asked why K1SEI showed "Middlesex" in Info (F2) and "Lower
Connecticut River Valley" in the cluster. Two sources: the entry panel has
a callbook answer, a spot carries only a callsign so the cluster derives one
from the FCC licence ZIP through GeoNames — and GeoNames has followed the
Census in replacing Connecticut's counties with the 2022 planning regions.
No award, callbook or log uses those, so every CT station matched nothing:
new county for ever, and counting toward nothing.
Measured against a full ULS import (1 556 444 US callsigns), 23 223 resolved
to a name the USA-CA reference does not contain. Three causes, three fixes:
- Spelling. "City and County of San Francisco", "Baltimore (city)",
"Nome (CA)", plus counties renamed since the award list was drawn
(Kusilvak, Oglala Lakota, the Valdez-Cordova split) and Alaska's four
"X City and Borough", whose reference codes read "JUNEAUCITYAND" because
the county-type suffix strip eats the wrong end. Normalised in
award.USCountyKey, which both sides already go through. 7 515 callsigns,
no re-download needed.
- Doña Ana, NM shipped into the reference as "NM/DO̱AANA" — mangled by a
non-UTF-8 CSV line, a code nothing could ever produce, so that county was
unwinnable and silent about it. Row repaired, cntygen now refuses such a
line, and a test makes every one of the 3 102 references reproduce its own
code from its own name.
- Connecticut. A planning region is drawn from towns in several counties, so
no name maps to a name — only the ZIP can resolve it. cmd/ctzipgen builds
the table from the Census 2020 crosswalk, filling PO-box-only ZIPs from the
nearest resolved centroid; all 11 ZIPs GeoNames still labels with a real
county agree with the result. 15 037 callsigns, applied at import, so the
store now carries a rules version and Settings says when a re-download is
needed.
Alignment itself is the last piece: a spot now shows the county the station is
logged with when we have one, and falls back to the ZIP-derived county only for
stations never worked.
The sampled colours were Warm light's own (#faf6ea / #e8dfc9 / #ddd2b8) —
the annotated screenshot was that theme, and the request written on it was
"just a little darker". Keep the cream on panels and the entry strip, take
the page, tab bar, toolbars and table headers a shade deeper, and move the
accent from burnt orange to ochre so the two are told apart in the picker.
Built from the three sands an operator sent: #faf6eb for panels, #e8dfca
for the page behind them, #ddd2ba for toolbars, table headers and rows.
The ordering is what makes it work — a panel reads as lifted off the page
and the log grid as settled into it, so rows stay scannable without extra
rules. Ink is a deep warm brown; pure black on sand glares.
The first version was a single switch meaning "command them all", and that is
wrong the moment a station has three: two SPE on a combiner and a PowerGenius
on another antenna would all go into OPERATE together, keying an amplifier that
has nothing to do with the pair.
It is now a set. Each amplifier is ticked into the group or not, the group is
stored as a list of ids, and an amplifier outside it keeps its own buttons —
which is the entire point of it being a set.
A group of fewer than two members is stored as none: one amplifier coupled to
itself would make every command fan out to a single member for ever.
A remembered member that is no longer running is skipped rather than failing
the command — deleting one amplifier must not break the button on the other.
An amplifier saved without an id cannot join, and the panel says so instead of
quietly omitting it from the list.
It sat above the first amplifier card. With three cards configured — the case
it exists for — that is a scroll away from anything the operator is looking at,
and it was reported as missing rather than misplaced.
Moved next to Add amplifier: coupling belongs to the SET of amplifiers, not to
any one of them, so it belongs with the other set-level control.
The SPE CO1-2 combiner is an RF device: it sums two amplifiers and commands
nothing. So "combined" operation is really two amplifiers that must be held in
the same state, and one left in STANDBY while the other keys means the combiner
sees power on a single input.
A switch in Settings → Amplifier makes ON, OFF and OPERATE act on every
configured amplifier. Offered only with two or more: coupling one amplifier to
itself is a switch that cannot do anything.
The METERS stay per amplifier, deliberately. Two amps combined are still two
amps, and an operator watching for one of them to run away needs to see them
apart — a summed bar would hide exactly the fault worth catching.
Fanned out in AmpOperate/AmpPower rather than in the UI: the card and the docked
widget both call these, and a coupling built into one would be missing from the
other, which on a combiner means one amplifier keyed and one not. The clicked
amplifier goes first, so a partial failure still did what the operator asked
before it stopped.
While linked, an amplifier with no power command — a PGXL on its direct link —
is skipped silently rather than reported: it would make a successful pair look
broken.
Puts "F4BPO is on air 14,074,000 FT8 IC-7300" on hrdlog.net's front page while
the station is operating, which is what HRDLog's own "Automatic HRDLog ON AIR"
setting does.
The endpoint and its field names come from HRDLog's own library
(github.com/iw1qlh/HRDLOG-net-library, HrdProtocol.SendOnAirAsync): OnAir.aspx,
with Frequency in Hz, Mode, Radio, Callsign, Code and App. Read rather than
guessed — an invented endpoint would have produced a switch that silently did
nothing.
HTTPS where that library uses plain HTTP: the upload code is a credential and
has no business crossing the network in clear, and the sibling NewEntry
endpoint on the same host already serves TLS.
A heartbeat every two minutes, not a change notification — HRDLog drops a
station from the list when it stops hearing from it. Silent when switched off,
unconfigured, or when the rig reports no frequency: announcing 0 Hz would say
the operator is on air on nothing. Failures are logged, never toasted; a
broadcast the operator did not ask for at that instant must not interrupt them
every two minutes on a flaky link.
Its own switch beside auto-upload rather than folded into it: this is a live
status and needs the rig readable, not a QSO.
QRZ publishes <nickname> — the name an operator goes BY on the air — and
OpsLog was composing fname + name instead. "Bob" is what belongs in a log;
"Robert J Smith" is what belongs on a licence.
QRZ only, and deliberately so: HamQTH's <nick> already fills the Name field
that way, so the same switch there would toggle a behaviour it has no way to
turn off.
A published nickname is optional, so an empty one falls through to the
registered name. That is the whole point of it being a fallback rather than a
swap, and it is what the test pins — a blank nickname must never blank the
name.
Spots were bounded by COUNT alone, so on a quiet band a two-hour-old spot sat
on the band map looking like something to chase. Settings → DX Cluster now
takes a lifetime: presets at 5/10/15/30/60 minutes, or any value up to twelve
hours, and 0 keeps the old behaviour.
Spots are REMOVED from the shared list rather than hidden at render. The
cluster list, every band map and the counts all read that one array, so pruning
it once is what makes the setting mean the same thing in every view — the
lesson already paid for when the band map ignored the cluster's filters. It
also gives the memory back.
A spot whose timestamp will not parse is never dropped: an unreadable stamp is
a reason to distrust the clock, not to throw away the spot.
Swept every 30 seconds — close enough that a 5-minute setting is honoured, and
invisible next to the spot stream. Clamped in the backend as well as the UI.
New Settings → Appearance section: whole-row colouring in the log grid driven
by QSL / LoTW state, each rule with its own colour from a palette or a free
picker. What Logger32 does, with one difference that matters — the colour is
applied as a 24% tint, not a fill. Logger32's grid is white; this one is dark,
and a saturated user-picked colour behind white text is unreadable at exactly
the moment the operator is scanning for what still needs sending.
Rules are ORDERED and the first match wins, because a contact is usually
several of these at once: one confirmed on LoTW and by card is confirmed, not
"sent, awaiting reply". The order lives in the data so the panel can show the
rules in the order they actually apply, numbered.
The colour is interpolated into a CSS color-mix(), so anything that is not
plainly #rrggbb is refused on the way in and falls back to the default.
Also fixes the QSO number column, which was empty for contacts logged from
WSJT-X: that path inserts through the repo directly and never reached AddQSO.
Rather than chase each of the remaining bulk-insert paths — the POTA hunter
import and the LoTW/QRZ "add what I was missing" passes, which insert OLD
dates and so shift every number after them — the index now checks its length
against a COUNT and rebuilds when they disagree. One indexed count beats
remembering to invalidate in a place that does not exist yet.
The store shipped without its main source. Locators came only from this
station's own WSJT-X decodes, which is what the whole MQTT discussion was
about.
PSK Reporter now feeds it through a new OnGrid callback, fired before any
geographic filtering: what the store wants is "which square is this callsign
in", and that is true whoever happened to hear the report.
The subscription filters on the RECEIVER's square, a level the v2 topic
exposes. Measured on the live feed: the four opening bands unfiltered are 83
messages a second, of which roughly one in a hundred survived the NearKm test
that already existed here — the rest was received, TLS-decrypted, JSON-parsed
and discarded. One ring of squares is 0.2 to 1.2 a second.
By square rather than by DXCC, which was the obvious alternative: one country
measured 1.2 messages a second (OH) against 72.5 (K) on a single band, because
a DXCC can be a continent. By square the same measurement is 0.2 to 1.2, so the
load follows distance — what the feed is actually about — and is the same for
every operator.
Grid chasing subscribes with the "+" band wildcard, so one subscription per
square covers every band instead of one per band per square.
The store gains a source column (decode | mqtt), migrated in place on an
existing file.
The callsign->grid map died with the process. Every restart began with an empty
Locator column that took an hour of listening to refill, and everything learnt
the day before was thrown away.
internal/gridcache is its own SQLite file in the data directory, not a table in
the settings database: that one sits wherever the operator chose to put it,
often a synchronised folder, and a store that rewrites itself every minute has
no business there. Deleting the file costs a few days of listening and nothing
else.
Callsign is the primary key and the newest report wins — operators move, go
portable, go on expedition, and a stale locator is worse than none for grid
chasing because it reads as a square already worked. Entries not seen in two
years are pruned at open: that is the one way this cache can be actively wrong
rather than merely empty, and it is what bounds a store that would otherwise
only grow.
Only CHANGES are queued. The feeds repeat themselves, so writing every report
would put the whole stream in the batch instead of the news in it. Batches
flush on a timer and on shutdown — a restart is exactly when the cache is worth
the most.
Rotation is switched off while the store is attached: the cap would discard
callsigns the database still holds and the lookup would then miss what we know.
Age in the store is the bound instead.
The band buttons in Station Control tuned to a fixed mid-band frequency baked
into the frontend. An operator who lives in the CW segment, or in the FT8
window, got the antenna resonant somewhere he never operates and had to nudge
it every time. The SteppIR's own controller has a Frequency (KHz) column per
band for exactly this; this is that column.
Stored sparsely: a band with no entry uses its default, so nothing migrates
and an operator sets only the bands he cares about. Left empty the Settings
box shows the default as its placeholder, which makes clearing it the obvious
way back.
The value is checked against the band plan before it is kept, because it goes
to the antenna as a tune command — a lost digit (1450 for 20 m) or kHz typed
as MHz would send the elements travelling to a length wrong for the band the
operator is on, and on a SteppIR that journey inhibits transmit the whole way.
A rejected entry is logged and the band falls back to its default.
Resolution happens in the backend and rides on the existing status poll, so
the widget no longer decides where a band button goes and cannot drift from
what Settings shows. Its own table stays only as a floor for the first poll.
The follow loop only ever had one behaviour — re-tune once the rig moved
further than a fixed step. The SteppIR's own controller software offers three,
and operators arrive with that mental model: every frequency change, past a
threshold, or only on a band change. They are real operating trade-offs, not
preferences: "always" keeps resonance perfect at the cost of motors running
constantly (and on a SteppIR every move inhibits transmit while the elements
travel), "band" moves them a handful of times a day.
"Always" is implemented as the threshold mode with a 1 kHz threshold rather
than as a separate branch, so all modes keep the one deadband reference that
matters: the rig frequency last commanded for, NOT the antenna's own reported
frequency — a SteppIR flips its reported frequency between the commanded value
and its home value, which would re-issue a SET on nearly every poll and leave
the operator permanently unable to transmit.
Band mode compares against the band last COMMANDED for, not the rig's previous
band, so the first move after startup and any move made by hand still get
reconciled. It applies to the immediate spot-click path too: a click inside the
band the antenna is already resonant in moves nothing.
An unset or unrecognised mode resolves to the step mode, so every config
written before this option behaves exactly as it did.
Also routes the antenna settings block through t() — it was hardcoded English.
The button was the wrong shape twice over. A maintenance chore does not belong
beside the options an operator actually chooses, and nobody should have to be
told their log is missing a field before it gets filled in.
So the distance is computed where QSOs come from: on the logging path and on the
ADIF import. fillDistance is its own function rather than part of
applyStationDefaults, because the import only applies those when the operator
ticks a box — and a distance is not a station default. It is derived from the
QSO's own two grids and is true whatever was chosen about profile fields.
What is already in the log is handled by a one-time migration at startup,
recorded by a settings key. In the background: on a large log over a remote
MySQL that is thousands of row updates and startup must not wait for a tidy-up.
Marked done only on SUCCESS, so a run cut short by a closed program tries again
next time rather than leaving half the log filled for ever.
An imported value still wins. It came from the log that made the contact, which
knew the real positions rather than two four-character squares.
The published page derives a distance as it renders, which fixed the empty
column there but not the cause: the field is empty in the database, so it goes
out empty in every ADIF export and leaves the same gap in whoever imports it.
BackfillDistances computes it from the two locators for QSOs that have both.
Only where it is EMPTY: a stored distance came from the log that recorded the
contact, which knew the real positions, and two four-character squares are a
worse answer that must not overwrite a better one. Whole kilometres, for the
same reason the published column is.
In the Database panel rather than beside the county backfill, which lives under
US Counties: this one touches the whole logbook, whatever country the QSOs are in.
The detection shipped reading whatever the operator's cluster nodes happened to
carry. On VHF that is a few hundred skimmers, nearly all of them on HF: a 6 m
opening carrying 869 stations reached OpsLog as a handful of spots or none, and
Nexus flagged it on the same PC while OpsLog stayed silent.
internal/pskr subscribes to pskr/filter/v2/<band>/# on PSK Reporter's MQTT
broker. Every ordinary station running WSJT-X reports what it decodes, so the
difference is two orders of magnitude rather than a threshold. The feed's shape
suits us exactly: BOTH grids are in each message, so distance and bearing are
arithmetic — no lookup, and no DXCC-centre approximation, which is what made the
cluster path's bearings coarse. The geometry is injected from app.go so it stays
the same arithmetic the cluster path uses; two answers to one question is how a
bearing quietly becomes wrong.
Volume was the design constraint, not the protocol. Six metres open is thousands
of messages a minute and this runs on some very old PCs, so nothing is kept or
persisted in the watcher: each message is parsed, measured and handed on or
dropped, and the detector's existing window does the deciding.
And the part that was the real bug: enabling the watch now ARRANGES ITS OWN
SOURCES. It adds the two RBN nodes when missing and brings the feed up. A
feature that silently depends on sources nobody can know are needed does not
look unconfigured, it looks broken. Matched on host and port, not name, so an
operator who renamed theirs does not get a duplicate — which the detector would
read as twice as many stations, and announce an opening that is not there.
Turning it off leaves the nodes alone: they may have been wanted for their own
sake, and removing a node someone is using is worse than leaving one they are not.
IOTA is an official ADIF field, and almost everything for it was already here:
the qso table has carried my_iota since the first migration, the insert and scan
handle it, and both ADIF import and export write it. The one missing link was
the station profile, so the reference had to be typed on every contact of an
island activation, or added afterwards in a bulk edit.
Migration 0025 adds the column; it joins my_sota_ref and my_pota_ref in the
profile, in the Station Information panel, and in the same stamp-if-empty block
that fills the other My* fields on a logged QSO.
Uppercased and trimmed on save. ADIF spells it EU-005, and an operator typing
"eu-005" would otherwise put a reference no award matcher recognises on every
QSO of an activation - the kind of mistake you only find months later.
rouggy