The answer to 'I have two rigs' was 'make two profiles', which moves the
whole station — logbook included — to change which radio is connected.
Radios are a list now, like amplifiers, and the CAT chip switches between
them while everything else stays put.
The active radio still lives in the settings keys the rest of OpsLog
reads, so the consoles, the CAT sharing and the band-follow needed no
change at all.
It showed what the radio calls itself over CAT — 'Kenwood (911)' for a K3,
a bare 'CAT' for a Flex that reports nothing useful. That is the answer to
a question nobody asks once the rig has a name in the list, and it made
the two radios look alike in the one place they have to be told apart.
The name the operator typed comes first now, on the chip and in the menu,
and falls back to the radio's own identity when they typed none. The model
identity is still in the tooltip, where it answers 'what is actually
connected' without taking the place of 'which of my rigs is this'.
It only became a menu from two radios, on the reasoning that a single
radio has nothing to switch to. That hides the feature from precisely the
operator who has not made a second radio yet — the click lands on a
settings dialog they did not ask for, which is what happened on the first
try. With one radio the menu now shows that radio and 'Add a radio…'.
Right-click still goes straight to the CAT settings.
The answer to 'I have two rigs' was 'make two profiles', which is a heavy
instrument for a light question: a profile carries the whole station —
logbook, callsign, awards, cluster, macros — so switching one to change
which radio is connected takes all of that with it, including a change of
logbook when the profiles point at different databases.
Radios are a list now, the way amplifiers already are. The CAT chip in the
status bar opens it, one click connects the chosen rig, and nothing else
about the station moves.
The storage keeps the ACTIVE radio in the same settings keys everything
already reads (cat.backend, cat.icom_port, …), and switching writes the
chosen entry into them and reloads the link. So the consoles, the CAT
sharing, the band-follow and every panel see exactly what they saw before
and needed no change at all — the list is a second store beside the
configuration, not a replacement for it.
Details that matter more than they look:
- An operator who has run one rig for a year opens the list and finds it
there, because a missing list reads as the CURRENT settings rather
than as nothing. It is written on the first save, not on the first
read.
- Editing the CAT panel updates the active entry, or an edit made before
switching away would be lost on the way back.
- A new radio starts as a COPY of the current one: a second rig is
usually the same shape with one port changed, and an empty form is a
form to fill in twice.
- Switching saves the panel first, so edits to the radio being left
behind are kept.
- The chip only becomes a menu with more than one radio; with one it
opens the CAT settings exactly as it always did.
THE README WAS GONE. A commit of mine last night replaced OpsLog's readme
with the text of the TCI protocol specification — 322 lines of ours for 77
of Expert Electronics' — and nobody noticed because nothing builds from
it. Restored from the commit before, then updated.
What it was missing, all of it shipped since: the Kenwood/Elecraft and
Yaesu CAT backends and their consoles, the SunSDR console, TCI audio in
both directions, CAT sharing over Hamlib rigctl or TCI, the Elecraft
KPA500/KPA1500 and the Tuner Genius XL, Cloudlog and HAMLOG uploads, the
RDA district work, the DXCC Challenge, the editable satellite list, four
main-view panes instead of two, and Esri basemaps in place of Carto.
Also a section on importing a log, which had none — including the rule
that matters most to somebody moving years of contacts across: a deleted
DXCC entity keeps the number the file gives it, because cty.dat only knows
where a callsign is today.
It has not shipped yet, so an operator reading about the SunSDR console
should meet what it does — not a list of repairs to a thing they have
never run.
Everything here came from one operator with the radio in front of him, and
most of it was mine to fix. The drive commands need the transceiver index
('drive:0,15;', not 'drive:15;') or the radio ignores them without a word.
The console now holds a click the radio does not echo, so a working button
stops looking dead — and lets go the moment the radio contradicts it, so a
REFUSED setting still tells the truth. Filters per mode, APF only in CW,
levels on wide rows with typed values, the RIT control shared with the
Icom console, the transmit meters, and a TUNE that can be switched off
again.
Two findings worth keeping: this radio re-asserts sql_enable eighty
milliseconds after being told to turn the squelch off, and it never
answers TX_POWER or TX_SWR — both are its own doing, and both are visible
in the log rather than argued about.
The transmit meters are asked for four times a second while keyed, so
logging every arrival would fill an evening's log — and a diagnostic that
fills a log is one that gets switched off instead of read. Twenty of each
is enough to tell an answer from a silence, which is all it is for.
Reported with a Logger32 export: the record said <DXCC:3>151 and OpsLog
stored 54.
cty.dat answers one question — where is this callsign TODAY — and that is
the wrong question for a log. R1MVI was Malyj Vysotskij Island, entity
151, until the ARRL deleted it in 2012; the same call resolves to European
Russia today. Forcing the lookup onto a 2004 contact therefore destroys a
credit that can NEVER be worked again, because the place no longer counts.
So the ADIF's number wins whenever it names a deleted entity, and nothing
is corrected on those records at all — the country name and the zones of a
deleted entity are equally beyond what a present-day prefix table knows.
The list is the ADIF specification's own enumeration, sixty-odd entities
that only change when the ARRL deletes another one.
The guard sits in the forced path, so it also covers the grid's 'Update
from cty.dat' on a selection — the other way an operator could have lost
the same credits, one right-click at a time.
Two things from one screenshot, and the second is arithmetic rather than a
bug.
Editing an award refreshed the grid and not the statistics matrix, so
changing which confirmations count left the table showing the old rule's
numbers with nothing to mark them stale. That is how a setting comes to
look as though it does nothing.
And OpsLog's 3229 against LoTW's 3004: the Challenge counts confirmed
band-slots on ten bands, and 60 m is not one of them. 3229 less the 224 in
the 60 m column is 3005. So the number was right and the QUESTION was
different — the panel now answers the Challenge one too, under the table
where the comparison is made.
The two totals also say what they are on hover. 'Total' and 'Général' side
by side tell nobody which counts entities and which counts band-slots, and
3309 read as entities is an impossible number — which is exactly how it
was read.
The log shows 'tx_power;' going out four times a second during a tune and
nothing coming back — but that proves less than it looks: a reply that
arrived and failed to parse leaves exactly the same trace as one that
never came. Both are now visible.
Two faults with one cause: this radio does not echo 'tune:0,true'.
So the panel never knew a tune was running. The button stayed on TUNE and
every further press sent another START — there was no way to stop it from
here at all. The state is recorded when the command is sent now; whatever
the radio says afterwards still wins, it simply never says anything.
And the transmit meters were asked for only while t.tx, which a tune
carrier does not set: the radio reports tuning as its own state, not as a
transmission. So power and SWR sat at zero for the whole tune — the exact
carrier an operator holds a tune for in order to watch an SWR on. They now
follow PTT or TUNE, and the S-meter reads '—' under our own carrier
either way.
TX_POWER and TX_SWR are read-only commands the radio answers when asked,
so they are asked for on each poll of a KEYED radio and not at all
otherwise: a receiving station pays nothing for meters nobody is watching.
Both appear next to the S-meter only while transmitting, because showing
them the rest of the time would show the last thing that happened as if it
were now.
An SWR of 0 draws as '—' rather than as 1.0. A perfect match on an antenna
nobody has measured is the one reading an operator should never be handed.
There is no temperature. The protocol's command list has TX_POWER and
TX_SWR and nothing thermal at all — so rather than leave the question
hanging, it is written down where the next person will look for it. A
temperature invented from something else, on a transmitter, is exactly the
kind of number somebody would trust.
A spot at 10131.5 showed as DATA in the cluster list and raised an alert
announcing SSB. Two tables answered the same question: the frontend knew
10.130-10.150 is the 30 m data segment, while the alert engine knew a CW
range that stopped at 10.130 and ended with a bare 'return SSB' for
everything else.
That fall-through was the fault. A band plan that answers 'SSB' for
anything it does not recognise is not a band plan, it is a default wearing
one — and it fed the alert text, the FlexRadio spot colours and the mode
the radio is told to switch to.
The Go table is now transcribed from the frontend's, segment for segment,
and returns nothing where it knows nothing. The order matters and is now
load-bearing — the FT8 and FT4 watering holes are listed BEFORE the wide
data blocks they sit inside — so there is a test that fails if anybody
sorts the table by frequency and quietly turns every FT8 hole into DATA.
WPM counts as CW while we are here: nothing else is reported in words per
minute, and RBN puts it on every line.
The log settles it, and it was not mute. Mute works: '→ mute:0,true;' and
the radio answers 'mute:0,true'. What happens is that the squelch REFUSES
to go off — we send 'sql_enable:0,false;', the radio echoes false, and
eighty milliseconds later announces 'sql_enable:0,true' again. Six times
in the log, always the same shape. The SQL lamp coming back on right after
a MUTE click is that revert landing, not the mute doing it.
So the optimistic hold is fixed rather than the phantom. It was a fixed
1.2 s, which is wrong in both directions: too short for a setting the
radio never echoes at all (AGC), and too long for one it refuses, where it
showed the operator a lie for a second. The requested value now stands
while the radio says nothing about that setting, and the instant the radio
reports any change for it, its word replaces ours. A refusal is therefore
visible immediately, and an unechoed setting still sticks.
Also from the same session: filters per MODE — the narrow end in CW, the
voice widths in SSB, a middle set for the digital modes — because 250 Hz
in SSB and 2.8 kHz in CW are buttons nobody presses. And APF is shown only
in CW: it rings a single tone out of the noise, which is a CW tool and
nothing else.
250 now means 0-250. It meant 575-825: the width was right and it was
centred on the CW note, on the reasoning that a CW filter should contain
the note. That reasoning may be right for a radio and it is still wrong
here, because it is not what the button says — and a button that does not
do what it says is worse than one that does something simple. The two
edges are editable underneath for anything else, which is what TCI takes
anyway.
And MUTE still lights the squelch on a real radio. Nothing in this code
can do that — the button sends mute and only mute, and the two are
separate state — so the radio's own announcements are logged as they
arrive. What it says after the command will settle whether this is our
reading or its doing; no more reasoning from here will.
Three things reported from the radio, all of them mine.
THE LEVELS. Two half-width sliders side by side left each of them a couple
of centimetres long, which is not enough to set 15% with. One level per
row now, full width, with the value typed in or stepped with ± — and in
the radio's own units, so the volume is dB and the squelch a dBm
threshold, matching what ExpertSDR3's own window shows.
THE FILTERS. The button said 250 and the radio was set to 300-550: 250 Hz
wide, but sitting where no CW note is. The edges are computed from the
width now, and a narrow filter is CENTRED ON THE CW NOTE — a 250 Hz filter
from 100 to 350 would put the note outside its own passband. A button also
lights on the WIDTH the radio reports rather than on an exact pair of
edges, so moving one edge on the radio no longer darkens every button.
MUTE. Read from one shape only, while this radio reports the other
('mute:0,false'), so the button showed the opposite of the truth. Both are
accepted now.
None of this should have reached main before somebody had a radio in front
of it.
Two faults, reported from a real SunSDR.
DRIVE AND TUNE DRIVE DID NOTHING, and neither did MUTE. Those commands
carry the transceiver index — 'drive:0,15;', not 'drive:15;' — and sent
without it the radio ignores them silently: no error, no answer, the power
unchanged. The rule was in the radio's own reports all along, which is
where it should have been read from: it announces 'drive:0,85' and
'mute:0,false' at connect, while 'mic_level:100' and 'volume:-12' come
with no index at all. Sending the shape the radio speaks in is the whole
rule, and it is now written down next to the two exceptions.
AGC LOOKED STUCK ON SLOW. The panel showed only what the radio reported
back, on the principle that the radio is the truth — but ExpertSDR3 does
not echo every setting it accepts, so a working button sat unlit. Changes
are shown at once and held for a moment now; whatever the radio announces
afterwards still wins, so a clamped or refused setting stays honest
without every working one looking broken.
Also from the same report, and fair: the consoles did not resemble each
other. The Icom panel's RIT control is now a shared component both use —
chip, signed offset, ± keys, wheel, and TYPING a value straight in, which
is the thing a row of ±10/±100 buttons cannot do. Ctrl+←/→ shifts the RIT
here as it does there. And LONG is gone from the AGC row: the protocol
takes it, but it is a hang time nobody reaches for between overs.
TCI pushes everything about the radio unasked, so the console is mostly a
place to put what was already arriving and being logged once as unhandled.
Drive, tune drive, mic gain, TUNE, volume, mute, squelch, NB/NR/ANF/APF,
AGC, passband, RIT and XIT, VFO lock, and an S-meter in real dBm.
Merged with two corrections to the audio page the console's own work
turned up: the radio was being offered as a recording microphone, and the
RX monitor was enabled for a source it cannot play.
Adding it to the device lists put it in all four dropdowns, and an
operator picked it as their RECORDING MIC — which would have recorded the
station they were listening to instead of their own voice, on every voice
message and every QSO recording. It is not a microphone, and it is not a
pair of speakers either: the audio going the other way is transmit audio.
So it is listed for 'From radio' and 'To radio', and taken out of the mic
and the listening dropdowns.
And the RX monitor is disabled when the radio IS the source, with a line
saying why: the TCI stream is pushed into the QSO recorder, and nothing
plays it to the speakers. The button was there, enabled, doing nothing
audible — which is worse than a button that says it cannot.
TCI already carries the frequency, the mode, the meters and now the audio.
It also carries everything else about the radio — and OpsLog was logging
most of it once as '(unhandled once)' and throwing it away. The console is
mostly a place to put what was already arriving.
That makes it the cheapest panel here, and it is worth saying why. A K3
console costs a command and a reply for every value it shows, which is why
it reads its settings in a rotation and its meters only while on screen.
TCI PUSHES: the radio announces its drive, its filters, its noise blanker
and the rest on connect, and again whenever any of them changes —
including when the operator changes them in ExpertSDR3's own window, which
this panel therefore follows without asking anything.
What it drives: drive and tune drive, mic gain, TUNE, volume, mute,
squelch and its threshold, NB, NR, ANF, APF, AGC speed, the passband, RIT
and XIT with their offsets, and the VFO lock. The S-meter is a real dBm
reading, so its S units are arithmetic rather than the calibration guess a
K3's meter needs.
Setters never update the cached state. The radio answers with the new
value, and taking its word is what keeps the panel honest when a setting
is refused, clamped, or changed at the radio a second later — the one
exception being a slider mid-drag, held for 900 ms so it is not dragged
back by its own echo.
Capped width and centred, like the other consoles. Also offered as a
docked pane — and the Elecraft console is offered there too now: App has
always had that pane, Settings simply never listed it.
Reported on an Ultrabeam over USB: the port could not be chosen from the
dropdown, and the panel would not scroll.
That field was a Combobox — a list you can also type into — chosen so the
port of an adapter currently UNPLUGGED could still be configured. It is
now the same Select every other serial device in OpsLog uses, the one that
demonstrably works. The case it was built for is kept differently: a
configured port that is no longer detected is added to the list, so it
stays selected and visible instead of vanishing when the adapter is out.
Also hardened the Test button's guard, which called .trim() straight on
the port and the host. A settings object without them — an older build, a
save that landed short — throws there DURING RENDER, and a panel that
throws while rendering is exactly a panel with a dead dropdown that will
not scroll. Whether or not that is what this operator hit, it is a way to
produce both symptoms at once and it costs nothing to remove.
Reported with a screenshot: the map came up with API KEY REQUIRED written
twice across the middle of it, on the Light and Voyager views only. Those
are exactly the two Carto basemaps.
Nothing here could have caught it. The tiles still answer 200 with a real
image — the watermark is IN the image — so the map looks like it is
working and simply says otherwise in large grey letters.
Both views move to Esri, which is already behind Street and Satellite. That
is the point: a second key-free provider is a second chance to be cut off,
and this is now the third time a tile source has changed its terms under
us. Light is Esri's light canvas with its own label layer, and Voyager
becomes the topographic map, labelled Topo — the stored key stays
'voyager' so nobody who chose it is quietly moved somewhere else.
The canvas runs out of tiles at zoom 16 where the others go to 19, so
maxNativeZoom is set per basemap: Leaflet upscales the last real tile
instead of asking for a level that does not exist, which is the difference
between a slightly soft map and a blank grey square.
Written into the entry itself rather than added as a line of its own:
somebody reading about the feature should learn it there, not two entries
further down.
A fourth amplifier brand alongside the SPE, the Acom and the PowerGenius,
sharing the same multi-amplifier support: the linking, the fan-out and the
polling all work on it unchanged.
The protocol is the Elecraft one — a caret, letters, a semicolon — decoded
from the KPA1500 Programming Reference, with the document's own examples
kept as the test. ^WS gives forward power and SWR in one exchange, ^VI
gives volts in tenths and amps whole, and ^FL is HEX: read as decimal, the
'antenna not connected' fault matches nothing at all.
Three things this amplifier does that the others do not, each handled
where it shows: a KPA500 has no network side, the amplifier answers while
its main supplies are off, and going to OPERATE clears the current fault.
Nothing here has met real hardware yet.
Telling somebody's amplifier where to be is a write to their station, and
it now has a switch — the SAME switch an Acom uses. 'Keep the amplifier on
the radio's band' is one idea to an operator; that it needs a second
serial port and a rig emulator on one amplifier and a single ^BN on
another is our business, not a reason for two checkboxes.
On by default for a KPA, because an amplifier left on the wrong band is
the worse outcome of the two, and the operator who has wired it straight
to the radio turns it off once. The hint says exactly that case, since it
is the only one where a second voice telling the amplifier where to be is
unwelcome.
Two things the wiring got wrong, both visible on screen.
A KPA fell through to the PowerGenius branch of the amplifier card and was
drawn as one — titled 'POWERGENIUSXL · ELECRAFT KPA1500', with a
PowerGenius's meters and none of its own. It has a card now: OPERATE, ON
and OFF, band, power, SWR, temperature, supply, and the fault across the
end. The OPERATE button carries a tooltip saying it also clears the fault,
because that is the button an operator already has under the cursor when
they need it.
And the band-follow option was offered on it. That option exists because
an Acom POLLS a transceiver and has no command to be given a band, so
following it needs a second serial port and a rig emulator answering those
polls. The KPA has ^BN — OpsLog simply tells it, on the link it is already
using, and only when the band CHANGES. The option is gone from the KPA and
the telling is automatic.
Also: Acom rather than ACOM everywhere it is read, which is how the
company writes it. Identifiers, package names and log lines are left
alone — renaming those is churn with no reader.
Wired into the multi-amplifier support that already carries the SPE, the
ACOM and the PowerGenius: a fourth brand rather than a fourth mechanism.
The linking, the fan-out and the poll all work on it unchanged.
Three things the KPA does differently, and each is handled where it shows
rather than explained in a hint:
- A KPA500 has no network side at all. Choosing it puts the entry on
serial, and a configuration still asking for TCP is refused with a
line saying so instead of retrying an address that cannot answer.
- The amplifier answers ^ON while its main supplies are OFF — a sleeping
microcontroller stays awake for exactly that — so power-on stays
available over the network, unlike the SPE and ACOM which need their
serial control lines.
- Going to OPERATE clears the current fault, everything except
temperature. The widget says so under the fault, because the button
that fixes it is the one already on screen.
Defaults that leave a working configuration when the model is changed:
38400 baud, TCP port 1500, and a full-scale power mark of 500 or 1500 W
by model — a KPA500 read against a 1500 W scale looks idle at full
output.
One package for both amplifiers: they share the Elecraft command set — a
caret, letters, a semicolon, case-insensitive in and upper case out — the
same family as the K3/K4 panel. What differs is the transport and which
commands exist, not the grammar.
Everything here comes from the KPA1500 Programming Reference, and the
document's own examples ARE the test:
^WS1204 014; 1204 W and SWR 1.4:1 — power and SWR in one exchange
^VI513 061; 51.3 V and 61 A — volts in tenths, amps whole
^FL91; HEX, and 0x91 is 'antenna not connected?'
That last one is why the parsing is pinned rather than eyeballed: read as
decimal, 90 and 91 become 144 and 145 and match nothing, so an amplifier
shut down by high reflected power would report a fault OpsLog could not
name. SWR in tenths is confirmed by the reference too — 'expressed in
tenths, 123 is 12.3:1' — where it had only been inferred from Hamlib.
The client is question-and-answer under one lock, never two questions in
flight: the reference states there is no flow control and that commands
are paced by waiting for the reply. Fast cycle four times a second for
power, SWR and the fault; the rest once a second.
Faults are named in the operator's terms — 'the ATU found no match', not
'fault 92' — and an unknown code from a newer firmware still says
something rather than nothing.
Not wired to the app yet, and two commands are deliberately absent: ^TX
makes the amplifier transmit from software, and ^ON0 cuts the main
supplies with Wake-on-LAN as the way back. Neither belongs on a poll loop
or behind a button that can be pressed by accident.
The columns took the award's declared band list when it had one, so every
band the award PERMITS got a column whether or not anything had ever been
worked on it. DDFM permits 6m and 70cm; a station that has never worked a
French department on either was shown two empty columns, which reads as a
gap in the log rather than as a band nobody tried.
They now follow the bands this operator actually has contacts on for the
award. The declared list is the fallback for an award with nothing worked
yet — there, saying what the award is played on is the only honest answer
available — and the classic HF set is the fallback for an award that
declares nothing either.
Together with taking the order from the full band list, this is what puts
23cm on DDFM: the column appears because there are contacts on it.
The columns were the intersection of the award's bands with a fixed list
that ended at 70cm, so a band the award genuinely covers could not appear
whatever it said. DDFM is worked well into the microwaves and had no 23cm
column, and nothing anywhere would have produced one.
The intersection is now taken against every band in frequency order, the
same list internal/award already sorts its own band counts by. The classic
HF-plus-2m-and-70cm set stays as the fallback for an award with no band
list and no contacts yet — the full list would be twenty-nine columns of
mostly nothing.
Reported from a station running an IC-7850 over USB: with split engaged,
turning VFO B moved VFO A slightly. OpsLog writes nothing to that radio on
its own — but it shares it, and what it was sharing was wrong.
Hamlib's 'f' means the VFO IN USE. RigState follows ADIF, where FreqHz is
where we TRANSMIT, and the two are the same number until split is
engaged — so the adapter handed FreqHz over unchanged and every client
asking for the dial was given VFO B. A client that reads the dial and
writes it back, which is what WSJT-X and its like do, then wrote VFO B's
frequency into VFO A. Hence a shift the size of the split offset, and
hence 'it did not do this before': it only happens with split on.
get_split_freq ('i') already answers the transmit frequency and is
untouched. The one-line rule is lifted into shareRXFreq with a test that
includes this case, the simplex case, and a backend that reports split
without ever filling in the receive frequency — which would otherwise
answer a client with 0 Hz.
Two faults, and the first was a design mistake of mine.
The choice was written only as the award override, to keep the imported
CNTY as a record of what HAMLOG said. But CNTY is what the comparison
READS, so the contact went on disagreeing for ever: settle a hundred
rows, run the comparison again, get the same hundred back. The reasoning
was about preserving evidence; the effect was a button with no visible
consequence anywhere, which is indistinguishable from one that does
nothing. This is the operator's own log, and correcting a field in it is
the point of the exercise. The district now lands in CNTY as well as in
the award reference.
And the settled rows stayed on screen, which made the same button look
broken a second time. They are dropped as they are applied — locally,
rather than by re-running the comparison, which reads the whole log and
would be seconds of silence on a remote database to be told what is
already known. The agree/disagree counters follow.
Reported by VK4DX with the case that names itself: YB confirmed on 20m
digital, painted blue, because one unconfirmed YB station had also been
worked on that slot.
The ladder ran call_c > call_w > dxcc_c > dxcc_w, so a callsign worked and
not confirmed beat an entity CONFIRMED on the same band and mode. The grid
answers 'what do I still need here', and a confirmed entity needs nothing
whoever was worked afterwards — so the order is now call_c > dxcc_c >
call_w > dxcc_w.
Two things made it easy to get wrong, and both are fixed rather than
merely corrected. The code was a run of assignments where the later test
silently overwrote the earlier, so 'call worked' erased 'entity
confirmed'; it now takes the maximum. And the rule lived inside a scan
loop where nothing could reach it, so it is lifted into bandStatusCode
with a table test — including this exact case, and one that fails if
anybody reorders the constants.
The comparison could show two hundred contacts where the log and the
database name different districts, and leave the operator with nothing to
do about any of them but open each QSO and edit it by hand.
Now each row carries the two values as buttons: click the district you
keep, then apply. There are shortcuts for keeping one source everywhere,
and applying is a separate act — clicking through two hundred rows with
each one written as it is clicked would make a slip permanent before the
reading was finished.
The choice is written as the contact's AWARD REFERENCE, not over the
imported CNTY, and that distinction is the point. CNTY is what the
downloaded log said; overwriting it would destroy the evidence the
comparison runs on, and the next comparison would agree with itself and
prove nothing. The override is the operator's decision, it is what the
award engine counts, and it beats both sources. So the log keeps saying
what it said, the database keeps saying what it says, and the contact
counts for the district that was chosen.
The buttons show the districts themselves rather than a tick box: someone
arbitrating between RO-19 and KO-05 should be picking a value they can
read, not remembering which source a checked box stood for.
v0.26.15 had already shipped, so its entry about setting the source by
hand in ExpertSDR3 goes back exactly as released — it describes the
version operators are running. What replaces it belongs to the version
that carries the change.
The specification settles what a night of experiments could only guess at.
TRX takes an optional THIRD argument naming the signal source — tci, mic1,
mic2, micPC, ecoder2 — and TCI 2.0 says it plainly: 'The signal for
transmitting is always taken from the microphone selected in the
ExpertSDR3. If a third-party software connected via TCI wants to transmit
its audio signal, you must specify the third argument - TCI.'
Without it the radio sends no chrono at all, whatever the mode. That is
what the SSB attempts ran into, and what was misread here as 'digital
modes only' — the mode was never the rule, the missing argument was.
So OpsLog says it, following the 'To radio' device: 'tci' when the voice
keyer owns the transmission, nothing at all otherwise, which leaves the
operator's own microphone alone for every other PTT. Nobody has to find
that setting in ExpertSDR3 and set it again for every mode, which is how
it is remembered there.
Two more things from the same document. A chrono with no audio ready is
now answered with silence rather than left unanswered — the vendor calls
that preferable. And the receive stream declares float32 and two channels
instead of trusting the defaults: they are the documented defaults, but a
default is something another program sharing this radio can have changed,
and a stream in an unexpected format is heard as noise rather than as a
mistake.
The TCI section of the audio settings was an investigation: open the
stream, read what arrives, record ten seconds to listen to, key a tone.
It answered every question it was built for — the frame layout, the
sample width, that the radio asks rather than follows a clock, that the
transmit audio source decides — and confirmed 80 W on real hardware.
None of that belongs in front of an operator now. The radio is simply one
of the devices in the two dropdowns, and choosing it IS the configuration:
one control, in the place where the question is already being asked.
Keeping the tick box beside it would have been two switches for one
decision, with the second one where nobody looks.
Gone with it: the stream/record/probe bindings, the audio.tci_rx setting,
and twenty-four translation keys. The plumbing they proved out stays and
now carries the voice keyer.
The RDA and Elecraft SWR entries move with it: both were written after
v0.26.14 was tagged, so they ship in the version that carries them rather
than in the one already on operators' machines.
A SunSDR carries its audio on the same WebSocket as its commands, so
OpsLog can take it directly: no virtual cable, no second sound card, no
Windows mixer between the recording and the air. The radio appears as a
device in both audio lists and can be chosen for either direction.
Everything here was settled on real hardware over one evening, and none of
it was guessable from the documentation:
- The receive stream answers format=3 for four-byte floats, so the
sample width is derived from the frame rather than trusted from the
field.
- The radio asks for transmit audio only when the transmission is the
CLIENT'S, and only when its transmit audio source is TCI rather than
the microphone.
- The chrono is a REQUEST, not a clock: no payload, carrying the size it
wants, 47 times a second. Audio goes out in answer to it and never on
a timer of our own — a timer was the first attempt and all 234 frames
of it were ignored.
Confirmed: a clean test recording, and 80 W out of a 1 kHz tone.
The radio now appears as a device in both audio lists — 'Radio (TCI
network audio)' — so the receive audio and the voice keyer can both take
the CAT link instead of a sound card. No virtual cable, no second card, no
Windows mixer between the recording and the air.
The transmit side reuses the exchange the tone probe established, with a
WAV in place of the sine: the radio asks, we answer with the next slice,
and it sets the pace. The message is converted once, up front, rather than
per frame — a voice message is a few hundred kilobytes, and resampling
inside a callback that has 21 ms to answer would put arithmetic on the
path where a late frame is a gap on the air.
The PTT is untouched by all this: the keyer keys before and unkeys after
exactly as it does with a sound card, so a transmission is bracketed by
the same code whichever way the audio travels. And the playback runs OFF
the CAT goroutine, since everything else about the rig goes through that
one place and a ten-second message would otherwise freeze the frequency
display and the antenna following for ten seconds.
Two refusals rather than silent failure. A radio that has gone away stops
being offered as a device at all, and a radio whose transmit audio source
is still the microphone is caught within a fifth of a second — a voice
keyer that transmits silence is worse than one that says why it will not.
Elecraft's release note settles it: SW; returns the most recent reading in
transmit or TUNE as three digits in tenths of a ratio — SW023 is 2.3:1,
and SW999 is the 99.9:1 it reports instead of infinity.
This asked for four, so every answer failed to parse and the bar stayed
empty for the whole transmission. A tester saw exactly that: no SWR at
all, which reads as an unsupported radio rather than an off-by-one.
SW also comes out of the probe list. It is known now, and asking again
mid-transmission costs a round trip on the link the carrier depends on.
Transmit over TCI is confirmed on a SunSDR: 80 W out of a 1 kHz tone at
70% of full scale into 80% drive, every request answered.
Which makes the earlier rule wrong. 'Digital modes only' came from a real
observation — SSB silent four times over, DIGU answering at once — but the
mode was a coincidence. ExpertSDR3 has a transmit audio SOURCE, microphone
or TCI, kept per mode, and it was on the microphone in SSB. Refusing SSB
would have blocked the one thing a voice keyer exists for.
So nothing is refused on the strength of the mode. The radio declares what
it wants by asking for audio, 47 times a second when it wants any: key,
wait for one request, and stop within two tenths of a second if none
comes — naming the setting to change rather than theorising about it.
That is better on three counts. It works in SSB when the source is set
right, it cannot be wrong about a mode nobody thought to test (AM, FM,
RTTY), and a misconfiguration costs a quarter-second of carrier instead of
five seconds.
The transmit path works: six passes, the radio asked 231 times and was
answered 231 times, none missed, and the tone was there on the panadapter.
What was missing was power on the meter, and the cause was the level. The
tone went out at a quarter of full scale, out of caution, into a radio set
to 15% drive — enough to draw a clean signal and not enough to move a
needle. In a digital mode the radio expects a line level it can drive to
full output; the POWER is its own drive control, so sending quietly only
wastes the range. Now 0.7, short of 1.0 to leave room for the peaks.
The start line carries both numbers — ours and the radio's drive — because
a quiet transmission has two possible causes and one line should settle
which, rather than an evening of guessing. Reading 'drive' off the radio
is the only reason it is parsed at all.
Three transmissions on a real SunSDR settled how the transmit side works,
and none of it was guessable from the documentation.
The radio asks for audio only when the transmission is the CLIENT'S: with
the operator keying the microphone it sent 282 receive frames and nothing
else. And it asks only in a DIGITAL mode — keyed from here in SSB it stayed
silent four times over, and answered in DIGU immediately. In SSB the
modulator is wired to the microphone, which is also the honest answer to
'why can I hear myself but not the tone'.
The chrono turns out to be a REQUEST, not a clock. It carries no payload —
the message itself is the ask — and it names the size it wants in the
header: 2048 samples, two channels interleaved, 47 times a second, which
is 1024 pairs at 48 kHz, exactly real time.
So audio goes out in answer to a request and never on a timer of our own.
The timer was the first attempt and the radio ignored all 234 frames of
it. Answering also hands the pacing to the radio: no drift, no buffer to
tune, and the size taken from what it asked for rather than from what we
assumed. The sine keeps its phase across frames, since one restarted every
frame is a click 47 times a second.
A pass in SSB is now refused rather than attempted. It keys the
transmitter, produces nothing and teaches nobody anything — and it is
still a transmission.
The feed mechanism is the one the voice keyer will use: WAV samples in
place of the sine, everything else unchanged.
A first real transmission settled one question and raised a better one.
With the receive stream open and six seconds of transmit, the radio sent
282 frames of receive audio and NOTHING else: no chrono, no transmit
audio. So the chrono the documentation describes is not offered to a
client that merely happens to be connected while the operator keys the
microphone, and waiting for it to appear is waiting for nothing.
The reading that fits is that the radio asks for audio when the
transmission is the CLIENT'S and takes the microphone when it is the
operator's — which makes the experiment obvious. Key it from here, push a
1 kHz tone, and watch. Chrono frames appearing gives their size and
cadence by measurement instead of by guesswork; no chrono but a tone on
the meter is just as useful, because then the pacing is optional and the
voice keyer can push frames at the rate the stream already runs at.
A tone rather than silence so the answer shows on the power meter and not
only in the log.
It transmits, so: an explicit button inside a warning box, five seconds,
capped at ten, and every path out unkeys — including the panic that has
not happened yet and a socket that dies mid-tone. A transmitter left keyed
by a defect is the one fault here that would reach somebody else's band.
Writes are now serialised too. send() held the lock only long enough to
read the connection, which was enough while every command came from the
poll loop; a stream of audio frames from a second goroutine is not, and
gorilla panics on a concurrent write rather than failing quietly.
The first transmit test came back with a log that said nothing, which is
the one answer that cannot be read: either no transmit frames arrived, or
they arrived and went unlogged.
So each pass is now bounded by a line of its own, and every stream type is
counted without limit. A pass that reports 'receive audio: 240, and
nothing else' is a result — it says the radio sends no chrono unless
something more is asked of it — where a log with no transmit lines was
merely a silence. The forty-frame logging budget is also handed back to
the transmit types on each pass, since it was always spent on receive
audio long before anyone got round to keying.
The start line says whether the receive stream is even open, because a
radio with nothing streaming has no reason to send chrono, and that is the
likeliest reason the first attempt saw nothing.
Two faults, one behind the other.
RDAPanel is nested inside SettingsModal so it can read its state, and it
was written as <RDAPanel />. A nested function is a new component TYPE on
every render: React cannot know it is the same panel, so it unmounted the
tree and mounted a fresh one — and a fresh scroll container starts at the
top. It is called now, like the other panels, which produces the same
elements in place and never disturbs the scroll position.
What it was reacting to should not have reached it either. The PSK
Reporter and grid-cache poll ran every three seconds from wherever you
were in Preferences, re-rendering the whole dialog for a count shown only
on the cluster section. It now runs while that section is open, and the
one-time loads it was sharing an effect with have stayed where they were
rather than refetching on every click in the sidebar.
The visible result: a hundred contacts to correct can be read from top to
bottom.
The 0.26.14 block described the satellite dropdown being clipped, then
not following the list as it was edited — both repairs made to a feature
in the same block, on a machine no operator has ever seen. An entry only
earns its place if a reader could have met the problem: the feature is
announced once and the fixes are simply part of it.
The launch story was told four times over — the startup log, the profile
folder, the fixed-version runtime, the Edge blocker. They are one answer
to one question, 'it does not start', and read better as one. Same for
the two RDA entries: one list, one repair.
The path had lost its backslashes and read LOCALAPPDATAOpsLogWebView2 —
not something anybody can follow to a folder they are being told they
may delete when it is the thing that is broken.
Confirmed on the machine that started this: an 'Edge blocker' utility was
in the way, and unblocking Edge fixed the launch.
Those tools work by registering a Debugger entry under Image File
Execution Options for msedge.exe and msedgewebview2.exe, so Windows
refuses to run the process. The runtime is installed and registers its
version quite happily — which is why the logs showed WebView2 present —
and then never starts. OpsLog draws its whole interface with that engine,
so the window never opened: no error, no crash, a process sitting there
doing nothing.
That entry is read at startup now and said plainly, in the log and on
screen, with the one thing that helps: unblock Edge in the tool that
blocked it. Reinstalling OpsLog cannot fix a machine in this state, and
that is where an unexplained silence sends people.
Also logs the Windows build and which Edge policies are set — value names
only, never their contents: a policy key holds URLs and account names
that are nobody's business here.
'The Evergreen installer will not install either' moves the problem out
of OpsLog's reach: the runtime is a Windows component, and on a managed,
offline or otherwise locked-down machine it may simply refuse.
Microsoft publishes the same runtime in a FIXED VERSION form — a folder
an application carries and points at, needing no installation and no
administrator. That is exactly this case, so OpsLog now looks for it
beside its own executable and uses it when it is there. The versioned
subfolder the download unpacks into is handled, because asking someone to
flatten it by hand is one more step to get wrong on a machine where
nothing starts.
No setting for it: that would be a question asked of the one operator
least able to answer it. The folder is either there or it is not.
The startup log also records the Windows build — the first thing anyone
diagnosing a runtime that will not install is going to ask for.
His log reaches 'entering wails.Run' and stops: WebView2 is installed
(120.0.2210.91) and never hands control back. A hang, not a failure —
there is no error to report, so the two remaining causes have to be
addressed rather than diagnosed.
The profile folder is now named explicitly, on the LOCAL disk. Wails
defaults it into the ROAMING profile, which on a managed account can be
redirected to a share; a WebView2 profile on a share that is slow or gone
does not fail, it hangs. Naming it also gives someone a folder they can
be told to delete, which is the fix when the profile itself is corrupt.
And a marker is written before the window is attempted, removed when it
paints. Finding it at the next launch means the last one never got there,
so that launch runs with GPU acceleration off: a WebView2 that cannot get
on with the graphics driver hangs exactly like one that cannot start, and
this is the single lever that separates them — at no cost on machines
where it was never the problem.
The data folder is created and stays empty, the process keeps running,
and no window appears. Nothing returns, so nothing is logged: WebView2
never hands control back, and a hang has no error to report.
So the ABSENCE of progress is reported. If OnStartup has not been reached
twelve seconds after wails.Run, that is written to the startup log and
shown in a message box naming the two causes — a missing WebView2 runtime
and an antivirus blocking msedgewebview2.exe — because 'OpsLog is not
responding' otherwise sends people to reinstall OpsLog, which is the one
thing that cannot help: the part that has not started is not ours.
His startup.log stops after 'data dir ok', which rules out the two faults
already covered and leaves the window creation itself — where a missing
WebView2 runtime lands, sometimes as a silent exit rather than an error
anyone can print.
So the runtime's version is read from where it registers itself (both
hives, and the 32-bit view where a per-machine install usually lands) and
written BEFORE the window is attempted: 'WebView2: not found' answers the
whole question in one line. Breadcrumbs now also mark entering wails.Run,
reaching OnStartup, and the window painting — which places any launch
that produces nothing between two known points.
Reported from a Windows 10 machine: the process appears, no data folder
is created, nothing starts. There was nothing to read because the only
log OpsLog has lives inside the folder that was never created.
Three exits happen before any window or log exists, and all three were
silent. Another instance already running — correct to refuse, since two
would fight over the rig, but indistinguishable from a crash. The data
folder unwritable — it is created BESIDE the executable, so a copy
dropped into Program Files is refused by Windows outright. And wails.Run
failing, which is where a missing WebView2 runtime lands; its error went
to println, which in a GUI-subsystem program goes nowhere at all.
Each now writes to %LOCALAPPDATA%\OpsLog\startup.log — a folder Windows
guarantees the user can write to, whatever OpsLog was installed into —
and shows a message box naming the fault and what to do about it.
Confirmed on a real SunSDR: the stream decodes and the test recording
plays back clean. So it can do the job a virtual audio cable was doing —
this wires it to the QSO recorder, which already accepts a pushed source
(the Icom network audio uses the same door).
The conversion lives here rather than in internal/cat: the radio's job is
to hand over what it sent, not to know that the recorder works in 16 kHz
mono. Three samples are AVERAGED rather than two of them dropped —
decimating by picking every third folds everything above 8 kHz back into
the voice band, and on a receiver that is hiss, which a QSO recording has
plenty of already.
Off by default, and applied the moment it is switched: it replaces a
sound card the operator has already wired up, and an option that needs a
restart to take effect reads as an option that does not work.
TWO FAULTS, ONE SYMPTOM — 'it refreshes ten times a second and the
buttons cannot be pressed'.
Preferences is a child of the main view, so every cluster spot, CAT push
and decode re-rendered the entire panel. On a busy evening that is
several times a second, and the panel is large enough that the rebuild
outlasts the gap between them: buttons missed their clicks because the
element under the pointer was replaced between the press and the release.
It is memoised now, and the callbacks App hands it hold their identity —
without that the memo compares unequal every time and buys nothing.
The dropdown menu was an absolutely-positioned child, so it was clipped
by whichever scrolling or overflow-hidden box it sat in: the satellite
list showed one entry of eight. It is portalled to the body now,
positioned from the field's rectangle, re-measured while open, and opens
upward when the field is near the bottom of the screen — which is exactly
where these fields tend to be.
It has been a combobox since it was written, but without showToggle it
opens only on a keystroke or ArrowDown — both of which have to be known
about first. On screen it is a text box, which is exactly what 'still no
dropdown' meant.
allowFreeText with it: the list is the station's own, so a bird worked
once and never added must still be loggable.
SATELLITES: the field read the list once, when the details panel first
mounted — which is at startup. A list saved in Preferences afterwards
therefore did nothing until a restart. It comes from App now, which
already reloads the lists when Preferences close.
RDA COMPARE: a failed comparison wrote its error into the message beside
the FILL DISTRICTS button, a row above — the error appeared under a
button nobody had pressed while the one that had been pressed showed
nothing, which reads as 'the button does nothing'. It has its own message
now, and reports the two results that look like silence: no disagreement
at all, and no Russian contacts to compare. Both buttons say what they
are doing while they do it, and the comparison logs before it starts
reading — on a remote MySQL that read is seconds of quiet.
overscroll-contain on the conflict box stops the wheel from chaining to
the pane behind it. With a short list — nothing to scroll inside the box
— the pointer over the table therefore froze the whole panel: the page
would not move and neither would the list.
The box scrolls when it has something to scroll; the page scrolls the
rest of the time, which is what containment was preventing.
Save builds the lists payload field by field, and the new list was not
among them — so every Save wrote an empty satellites array over whatever
had just been typed.
Normalised in the save as well as on the field's blur: the Save button is
reachable without ever leaving the box, and a list whose survival depends
on where the cursor went first is a list that saves sometimes.
SAT_NAME is compared character for character by the awards and by LoTW:
AO-91 and AO91 are two different satellites to everything downstream, and
typing it afresh on every pass is how one of them ends up in a log. So
the station keeps its own list (Preferences → Lists → Satellites) and the
field offers it, alphabetically — while still accepting anything typed,
because a bird worked once and never added to the list must not be
impossible to log.
Not seeded with a shipped list of two dozen birds: an empty list means
this station does not work satellites, and filling the dropdown with
names nobody here has heard makes the field harder to use, not easier.
Also fixes the RDA district comparison: its conflict list was capped at
about six visible rows of a list holding up to two hundred, in a panel
that would not scroll to show the rest, and nothing in it could be acted
on. Taller, scrolling, and a callsign opens the contact.
Three wide buttons for something most radios cannot vary was noise, and
they pushed the fields below into whichever grid column came next — the
panel looked shuffled.
Now: a dropdown, shown only when the brand has more than one way in. A
Yaesu is reached over USB and that is the end of it; a control offering
one entry that cannot be changed is a decision that is not one.
Brands: OmniRig first — it is the one that works with any radio, so it is
where someone who cannot find their rig should land — then alphabetical.
Kenwood and Elecraft drop the proprietary-network entry: neither is
implemented and neither is planned, and naming a road that goes nowhere
is only useful when someone might reasonably look for it.
The standalone checkboxes (protocol log, DTR/RTS) take a full row instead
of half of one, which is what was breaking the alignment.
The backend list mixed two different questions. 'Icom (USB)' and 'Icom
(network)' were separate entries; Kenwood and Elecraft hid the same
choice in a field further down; and Flex, TCI and OmniRig sat in the same
list as if they were the same kind of answer. An operator picks a radio
and then says how it is plugged in, so that is what the panel asks, in
that order, and the two answers together choose the backend.
Each brand offers only the connections it has, and a brand with one way
in still shows it, greyed: 'there is no choice here' is an answer and an
empty space is not. The stored backend names are unchanged — 'icom-net'
is still 'icom-net' — so a settings file written by an older build keeps
working, and brand+connection are DERIVED from it rather than held
alongside it, which is what keeps them from drifting apart when something
else writes the backend.
USB, RS-232-to-Ethernet, and the radio's own network protocol are three
different things, so they are three entries in one dropdown — and the
transport is now a stored setting rather than something deduced from
which field happened to be filled in. The old rule (a host wins whenever
it is not empty) is invisible from the settings page: someone who typed a
host months ago and later set a COM port had a radio that never answered
and nothing on screen to say why.
The third entry is named and refused, with the reason. It is a session
with its own framing and login, not the CAT byte stream over a socket, so
it has to be written per radio and against one — and a K4 owner reading
this list should be told that, not left wondering whether the empty
address field was the problem.
The upgrade reads an older install from what it has: a configured host
means the bridge, which is what the previous code used it for. Pinned by
a test, including the case that matters after the fact — choosing USB
with a stale host still stored gives the COM port.
The network option IS implemented — the same ASCII CAT over TCP instead
of a cable, for a ser2net bridge, an Ethernet-serial adapter, or a radio
exposing its raw CAT port. What was wrong is how it was offered: the COM
port and the network address sat side by side with nothing to say that
the address wins whenever it is not empty.
Worse, the example address read 192.168.1.50:4532. That is Hamlib
rigctld's port — a different protocol, and the one OpsLog SERVES under
'Share CAT'. Anyone copying the example was pointing the radio link at
OpsLog's own server.
Now one choice, then the fields that belong to it. And when the far end
answers something that is not the radio's CAT, the error says that rather
than 'check the baud rate', which over TCP is advice about a setting that
cannot be the cause.
F3 listed every award that existed, enabled or not, followed or not — so
a station chasing three of them assigned references from a list of twenty
and had to know which of the twenty mattered.
It now applies the same two rules the Awards tab already uses: an award
switched off in the editor is not a candidate for anything, and when a
selection of followed awards exists, only those are offered. An empty
selection still means all of them, so nobody loses a picker by never
having chosen.
A station with a switch knows something the log does not: which antenna
is actually connected. The working conditions hold what was PLANNED for
the band, and stay right until the operator throws the switch — after
which every QSO keeps claiming the other antenna.
Optional, and off by default: a station that names its antennas
differently in the two places would otherwise find its log quietly
rewritten. The name written is the one configured on the device, since
that is the name the operator gave it and the one they will look for.
WHICH PORT is the real problem, and the reason this is not a one-liner.
The switch has two, the radio has two jacks, and the QSO went out through
one of them; naming the wrong port's antenna is worse than naming the
band default, because it looks authoritative. The radio's own TX antenna
selection decides, and the jack-to-port wiring is a setting — it is the
station's cabling and neither device can report it.
When the port cannot be told — a transverter jack, a rig that reports
nothing, both switch ports live — nothing is written and the band default
stands. Silence beats a confident guess in a field nobody re-checks.
Reported: OpsLog shows STANDBY on a PowerGenius XL that is operating, and
pressing the button 'puts it in Operate' — because it was already there.
The amplifier's status frame has no operate= field. The direct GSCP
client only looked for one, so Operate stayed at its zero value until the
operator pressed the button: at startup OpsLog was not reading the state
wrongly, it was not reading it at all.
The live state is in the frame under 'state', and the FlexRadio side of
this same amplifier has been reading it that way all along — anything but
STANDBY/OFF means the amp is in line, with IDLE meaning in line but not
keyed. The GSCP client now does the same when no operate= is present.
An unknown state leaves the flag alone rather than guessing: claiming
STANDBY on an amp that is in line is precisely the error being fixed, and
it invites the operator to switch on what is already on.
Reported from a multi-monitor station: window.json held x=-7680 and the
window opened where nobody could see it, with no way back short of
editing the file — which nobody knows to do.
The guard existed but asked the wrong question. It tested the position
against the VIRTUAL SCREEN, the rectangle spanning every monitor, and
monitors rarely tile that rectangle: a wide screen beside a tall one, or
one mounted higher, leaves gaps inside the box that belong to no monitor.
A window in a gap passes a bounding-box test and is invisible. The test
now walks the monitors themselves, through EnumDisplayMonitors, and uses
each one's WORK area — a title bar under the taskbar cannot be dragged
either.
A position that is genuinely lost is now MOVED onto the nearest monitor,
keeping the window's size. Handing it back to Windows lost the size too
and dropped the window on the primary screen wherever Windows chose.
The arithmetic is in screenclamp.go with no Win32 in it, and tested
against the reporter's four-monitor layout and against a gap between two:
this fault is invisible by definition and cannot be reproduced without
the reporter's screens, so a table test is the only place it can be held.
The layout is also logged at every start, since the first question after
'OpsLog does not open' is what the screens looked like.
The frame log had one budget for the whole session, and the first forty
receive-audio frames spend it in under two seconds. A transmit-chrono
frame — the thing the voice keyer will have to answer, and whose size and
cadence cannot be read off the documentation — only appears once the
operator keys the radio, by which time nothing would have been logged.
Counted per type now, so the first frames of each kind are recorded
whenever they turn up.
The SunSDR announces its own stream at connect —
audio_stream_sample_type:float32 and audio_stream_channels:2 — and both
were being logged as unhandled while the code worked the format out from
frame arithmetic. The declaration is better evidence and arrives before
the first frame; the arithmetic stays as the check on it. The channel
count now drives the mix-down instead of an assumed stereo.
Adds a ten-second test recording, written as a WAV beside the QSO
recordings. Counting frames proves a socket is delivering bytes; it says
nothing about whether those bytes are the receiver's audio, at the right
rate, in the right order. A stream decoded with the width wrong or the
samples misaligned counts exactly as well as a correct one and sounds
like a fan — so the test is a file the operator can play, the same way
the CW decoder was settled on the air rather than on a spectrogram.
The file is written at the rate the RADIO reported, not a constant: a
recording at the wrong rate plays at the wrong speed, which is the one
fault that would be blamed on the decoding.
A real SunSDR answers format=3 where this expected 0 — and 0 was read
from the documentation, which is exactly the kind of detail a memory of a
document gets wrong. The stream was refused outright: 'format=3, expected
float32', zero frames, silence.
Swapping one magic number for another would only move the guess, so the
width is now MEASURED: the header says how many samples the payload
holds, and dividing gives the bytes per sample. Four is float32, two is
16-bit PCM scaled to the same -1..1 the rest of the audio path uses, and
anything else is reported rather than mangled. That stays true whatever
number the format field carries on the next firmware.
Two things reported together, both about a list that fights back.
The GRID froze nothing: every spot landed at the top and pushed the rest
down, so a few rows in, the callsign under the pointer had moved by the
time the click arrived. It now stops redrawing as soon as it is scrolled
away from the top and says how many spots are waiting; reaching the top
again, or clicking the notice, releases it. The arrivals are counted by
finding the frozen top row in the live list rather than by comparing
lengths — the list is a ring buffer, so once it is full a length
comparison would report nothing new for the rest of the evening.
The COMMAND BUTTONS were capped at 120 characters. A DXSpider filter
naming the prefixes an operator wants runs well past that, and the field
just stopped accepting keystrokes: the command was saved truncated with
nothing to say why. 500 now, with the full text in the tooltip since the
box cannot show it.
The transmit meters were read on k.tx, which records only that OpsLog
keyed the radio. An operator using the front-panel PTT, a footswitch or
the mic button therefore had a panel that believed the rig was receiving
— and since the power and SWR bars are read only while transmitting,
they were never read at all. IF carries the radio's own transmit bit;
that is what decides now.
The meter probe logs RAW answers rather than parsed numbers, and asks a
wider set (SM, SMH, BG, SW, PO, TQ). A command answering in a shape we
did not expect is the interesting case, and parsing hid it behind the
same dash as a command the radio refused — which is what still stands
between us and a working SWR reading on a K3.
FT8 decodes made on 14.095 were labelled 2190 m. That band is 135.7-137.8
kHz, and every affected decode's audio offset plus 136.1 kHz lands inside
it — while the ones shown with no band at all land just above 137.8. The
decodes were being stamped with another instance's dial.
WSJT-X refuses to start a second instance without --rig-name, so its ids
differ and keying on the id worked. MSHV has no such rule: both copies
call themselves 'MSHV', so the LF instance's Status overwrote the HF
one's dial, T/R period and mode.
Instances are now identified by their sending socket as well as their
name — the socket is stable for as long as the program runs, which is
exactly the lifetime this has to hold over. A second application claiming
an id already in use is shown as 'MSHV #2' and says so in the log, so the
decodes panel can still split them.
This also fixes replies: a Reply was addressed to whichever copy sent
Status last, which on a two-instance station is a coin toss.
A station new on this band AND in this mode is one status, 'new-band-mode',
and the badge table has an entry for neither half. The lookup returned
nothing, so those rows showed only their grid or prefix badge — and with
NEW/BAND/MODE selected, a row whose visible badges were LOC and PFX read
as the filter letting through things nobody asked for. It was not: the
row belonged there and the panel failed to say why.
catsOf has always split that status into its two categories for filtering.
The badges now do the same on screen.
Both are the same bug. ReadState returns early while transmitting — the
rig answers '?;' to IF; then, and treating that as a fault used to drop
the link — but that early return also skipped the panel update and the
meter read.
So the panel believed the radio was still receiving. Pressing MOX again
therefore sent ANOTHER transmit command instead of RX, and the K3 stayed
keyed, exactly as reported. And the power and SWR bars were only ever
read at the one moment they mean nothing.
Reading meters while transmitting needs one more guard: a '?;' then says
when the question was asked, not what the radio supports, so the
unsupported-command memory is suspended for that read. Without it, one
badly timed refusal would silence a meter for the rest of the session.
Adds RIT/XIT offset control (±10/±100 Hz, offset shown), a 4.0 kHz filter
button for FT8, and logs the K3's icon word when it changes: there is no
command for 'is the ATU in line', the reference says the switch functions
show up as icon changes, so an operator toggling the ATU while watching
the log will name the bit and the button can then light up honestly.
A SunSDR already carries its receive audio on the same WebSocket as its
commands, so a virtual audio cable and a second sound card are two pieces
of plumbing an operator installs for no reason. This is the receive half:
what the QSO recorder and the CW decoder need.
The reader now looks at the frame type. It used to ignore it and split
every frame on ';' -- harmless only for as long as no stream was ever
opened, since audio bytes would otherwise have been handed to the command
parser a hundred times a second.
NOTHING HERE IS CONFIRMED ON A RADIO. The header layout comes from the
TCI documentation, and the stream-type numbers are exactly the sort of
detail a document gets right and a memory of it does not -- so the first
forty frames of a session are logged verbatim, and a test bench in
Preferences > Audio reports the sample rate the radio chose, the frames
arriving and the peak level of the last second. 'The stream is open' and
'audio is arriving' are different claims and only the second is worth
anything to whoever tries this first.
Transmit (the voice keyer) is the other half and is deliberately absent:
it has to answer the radio's chrono packets at the right pace, and that
is worth doing once the format is settled on real hardware.
Dragging a four-pixel slider to change the power by five watts is a fussy
gesture, and the Flex and Yaesu consoles have had the wheel for a while —
an operator moving between them expects it.
React registers onWheel as PASSIVE, so preventDefault() there is ignored
and the panel scrolls under the pointer while the value changes; the
listener is attached natively instead, with the live values read through
refs. Both existing panels solved it the same way, so this is a third
copy turned into one shared component -- used by the new console only.
The other two are left alone deliberately: they work, they are in daily
use, and their styling differs in ways a merge would have to guess at.
Power steps 5 W a notch, matching the K3's own coarse step.
SWT20 was written from memory of the reference rather than from Table 7,
and 20 is not an ATU switch at all — it would have pressed something else
on a real K3. An operator read the table out for us: switch 19 is the ATU
row, TAP for a tuning cycle and HOLD for tuner in line or bypassed.
Adds the HOLD as its own ATU button, because on the radio they are two
different things: tuning is a cycle you start, bypassing is a state you
leave it in.
Power takes 0-110 W on an Elecraft, per the reference — a K3 makes a
little over its rated output — while a Kenwood keeps 200.
The list is a ring buffer that held a thousand spots, and on a busy
evening a thousand arrive in a couple of minutes. So the buffer decided
how long a spot lived, and the spot LIFETIME setting never got the chance
to expire anything: fifteen minutes meant nothing when the oldest spot
was pushed out after two.
Now settable (Preferences → Cluster, beside the lifetime, since between
them they decide the same thing), 100 to 10 000. The ceiling is a real
limit rather than a round number: every spot is matched against the
worked index and the alert rules, and is a row the cluster grid and every
open band map re-render.
Reading the cluster means running down dozens of lines, and a single
click did the whole job — QSY, mode, callsign — so every line looked at
dragged the radio with it. One stray click while reading took the
operator off the station they were working.
Looking and going are two different intentions, so they are two gestures
now. The band map is unchanged: clicking a spot there is already a
deliberate act, not a way of reading a list.
Reported from a real FTDX101, and each one is a different kind of wrong.
MIC GAIN was read and written through the 0-255 scale the audio gains
use, but the CAT reference gives MG000-100. A rig set to 80 therefore
showed 38, and moving the slider sent 204 — outside the range the radio
accepts, so it refused the command and the slider sprang back. That
snap-back was the symptom; the scale was the cause.
POWER was capped at 100 W by the slider, not by the radio. There is no
CAT command for 'how much power can you make', so the ceiling comes from
the model name, with the rig believed if it ever reports more than the
table expects — it has just proved what it can do.
NAR is the narrow IF filter, and on a rig that does not implement NA the
button showed a state the radio never gave and did nothing when pressed,
which reads as a fault in the radio. Now shown only when the rig answers,
with a tooltip saying what it is.
Also: the frequency readout steps the Hz digits under the wheel, not just
the kHz ones. Zero-beating a CW signal is a few tens of Hz and it was the
one move the display would not make. And the split chaser is CW-only —
its marker comes from a CW skimmer.
An operator reading a cluster page sees 28500 and wants to be there. The
hands are on the callsign field; reaching for the frequency box, or the
mouse, is the part that loses the station. So the call field takes a bare
number on Enter: kHz for a frequency, or a band on its own.
Ambiguity resolves to the band on purpose -- 40 is 40 m, not 40 kHz --
because neither of those kHz values is anywhere a radio tunes, and it
reads the way an operator says it. Anything with a letter in it is a
callsign and behaves exactly as before; a number that is neither a band
nor a plausible frequency does nothing at all.
Bands go through the ordinary band change, so the antennas, the per-band
power table and the outbound integrations hear about it as they would
from the dropdown. Also adds 4 m to the QSY table, so a band that can now
be typed is a band that has a frequency to go to.
It filled the window: on a wide screen a slider ended a hand's width from
its own label and the panel stopped reading as one instrument. Capped and
centred like the Yaesu, Icom and Flex consoles, grouped into Meters,
Levels and Receive cards, with the level sliders in two columns.
Also opens the 0.26.12 block: the TQSL logging and this console were
written after v0.26.11 was tagged.
So the tester can exercise everything in one session instead of one
control per build: RF and mic gain, squelch, preamp, attenuator, NB, NR,
AGC, filter width, antenna, RIT/XIT with a clear, and the keyer speed.
The analogue scales differ between an Elecraft and a Kenwood — RF gain
000-250, mic 000-060, squelch 000-029 against 0-255 — so each is mapped
through its own full scale and shown as a percentage. Using one rig's
range on the other silently halves or doubles every setting.
Antenna only appears when the radio answers AN: a K3 without the internal
ATU has one socket, and a switch that goes nowhere is worse than none.
The Elecraft backend already existed; what was missing was somewhere to
operate the radio from. This adds the panel, on the Kenwood-dialect
client the K3 already speaks, in a tab of its own beside the Yaesu and
Icom consoles.
Scope is the six controls asked for and nothing else. Every extra command
added without a radio to test it against is a control that may or may not
do what its label says, and a K3 exposes dozens.
No K3 was available while writing this, so the two halves are treated
differently. The setters are the commands the reference documents
unambiguously and whose effect is visible and reversible (PC, AG,
TX/RX). The meters are the opposite: their scaling differs by model and
firmware, so the raw answers are logged next to the power setting, the
panel says the scaling is provisional, and an unmeasured SWR shows as
'—' rather than as a perfect 1.0 — a good match on an antenna nobody
measured is the reading that costs a radio.
ATU tune sends SWT20 (the K3 front-panel tap) and logs exactly what it
sent, so a wrong mapping names itself instead of leaving an operator
guessing which button OpsLog pressed.
'No QSOs processed' (exit 8) covers already-uploaded, out-of-certificate-
date-range, and a station callsign that does not match the location being
signed with -- TQSL's message does not say which. An operator whose QSO
was refused and then accepted after a round trip through another logger
is reporting a difference in the record itself, and the temp ADIF is
deleted the moment TQSL returns, so that difference could not be seen.
Logged on any non-zero exit: the record verbatim, the exit code and the
station location. It is QSO data; the key password is not logged.
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.
Club Log wrote to this station about 167 requests in four minutes and a
coming IP block. That was one deletion of a couple of hundred rows going
through delete.php, which is a REAL-TIME endpoint: it exists for an
operator removing a contact they just logged wrongly, at human pace.
Today's earlier fix stops the requests that were pointless -- QSOs Club
Log never had. This one handles the rest, which are legitimate but still
a batch: one delete every 1.2 s, and a stop at 25 with a line saying to
finish on clublog.org. There is no bulk-delete API to move to, so going
slower and refusing to push a large deletion through a real-time endpoint
is the whole of the answer.
Costs the operator nothing: the withdrawals already run in the
background.
Five entries were written after v0.26.9 was tagged (b952e07), so they
were never in the release the operators actually got -- their What's New
stops at the Club Log delete fix.
Send-on-type keys each character as it is typed, which only the WinKeyer
and Flex CWX can do -- so the checkbox is shown for those two alone. The
stored preference, however, survives a change of engine: an operator who
had used it on a WinKeyer and moved to CI-V carried an invisible switch
that was still on.
The consequences fit the report exactly. Nothing keyed while typing,
because wkSendRaw falls through to the WinKeyer that is not there; and
Enter sent nothing either, because sendText believes the text has already
gone out. Macros take another path and kept working.
The panel now derives the flag from the engine rather than trusting the
stored value.
The transmit row already carries SPLIT, TUNE, MOX, the chaser, its offset
and the TX readout. The marker field was the one control on it that is
set once -- to agree with SDC -- and then never touched again, so it is
summoned by right-clicking the button instead of parked there. Enter
commits, Escape restores. The button's tooltip says so: an unannounced
right-click is not a feature.
The marker field needs no caption -- it sits against a button showing the
same text -- and 'offset' spelled out crowded a row that already carries
SPLIT, the chaser and the TX readout.
Nobody has seen 0.26.9 yet: a fix to a feature released in the same block,
and the panel field it should have had from the start, are not news --
they are how the feature works. Folded into the one entry.
The marker text is chosen in the skimmer, and the two have to agree or
nothing fires -- so it belongs next to the switch, not in a settings page
the operator would have to remember exists. Kept as raw text until blur:
it is a comma-separated list and normalising each keystroke would eat the
comma as it is typed.
GetFlexRSTChase read settings.Get with profileScope() prepended, but the
store already prefixes the active profile: it wrote p3.flex.rst_chase and
read p3.p3.flex.rst_chase. The switch went on in the UI, was saved, and
came back off on the next spot -- so the feature did nothing, silently.
Every refusal after a marker is recognised is now logged with its reason.
The operator has just seen a report marked on the panadapter; if the
slice does not move, the log has to say what stopped it.
Working a DXpedition split means guessing where it listens. The useful
information is not the callsign the DX answered but the FREQUENCY that
station was calling on, and a CW skimmer already marks it: SDC posts each
decoded report to the panadapter as a spot.
Those spots reach OpsLog through the radio's spot feed. On a marker, the
TRANSMIT slice moves there plus a signed offset; the receive slice never
moves, because losing the DX is worse than missing a call. The marker
text is a setting -- it is chosen in SDC by the operator, so any constant
here would be wrong for whoever chose otherwise -- and the switch is a
button beside SPLIT, since it is turned on when a DXpedition appears and
off when it is worked.
Moves are throttled and ignore a marker landing where the slice already
is: a busy pile-up produces several reports a second and the slice would
otherwise never be anywhere long enough to call.
The spot feed is now subscribed to unconditionally. It was tied to
OpsLog's own spot overlay, so an operator running SDC with the overlay
off received nothing -- the reason no foreign spot was ever logged. The
connect-time 'spot clear' stays behind the overlay flag: it wipes every
spot on the radio, a skimmer's included.
Chasing a split pileup with a CW skimmer means acting on the report the
DX just sent: SDC posts what it decodes as panadapter spots, so the 5NN
is already on the radio and OpsLog already subscribes to 'spot all'.
What is not known is the shape of those spots -- which field carries the
report, whether it is the callsign or the comment, what source the
skimmer names itself. Guessing produces a feature that never fires, so
this logs the first 60 foreign spots of a session verbatim and does
nothing else. Bounded because a skimmer posts hundreds an hour.
The award field list offered us_county, which returns STATE,County --
correct for the United States, where Jefferson County exists in several
states, and wrong for every award whose district is already unique. An
RDA reference (RO-19) never matched, and there was no other field to
point an award at.
Adds county, the raw CNTY value, alongside it.
The import printed four numbers and left nothing behind. 1106 matched
and 395 unmatched out of 1501 is not a report: the operator cannot see
which contacts were confirmed, nor work through the discrepancies.
Two additions. The Results view is now filled with the confirmed
contacts, flagged new entity/band/mode/slot against what LoTW and paper
QSL already confirm -- the only sense in which a HAMLOG confirmation
changes anything. And the unmatched ones can be written out as ADIF,
because a few hundred of them are a list to open and compare, not
something to read in a log window.
Deleting a selection with 'delete from the remote services' on took
minutes. Club Log was called for EVERY deleted QSO, uploaded or not, and
for the ones it never had it answers 403 -- a full network round trip per
contact, in series, on the goroutine the UI was waiting on. QRZ already
skipped records with no stored logid; Club Log had no equivalent guard.
Three changes, each fixing one part of the delay:
- only contacts whose clublog upload status is Y or M are withdrawn;
- the withdrawals run in the background, after a snapshot -- the local
log is the operator's own copy and must not wait on two websites;
- the hooks read the rows in one query instead of one per id, which on
a remote MySQL logbook was 2 round trips per QSO before the DELETE.
Consecutive refusals now abort the run: Club Log blocks an account that
keeps sending requests it refuses, so working through the rest of the
selection only earns a longer block.
Their agent protocol has no download verb, so the return path is a file
exported from their site. Running that file through the ordinary ADIF
import is the wrong tool and does real damage: it matches on callsign +
UTC minute + band + mode, their export is rebuilt from their own
database and rarely agrees to the minute, and 'update duplicates' then
inserts everything that failed to match -- several hundred copies of
contacts already in the log.
This path matches only. It stamps the confirmation on QSOs it finds,
falls back to the mode-CLASS key for the modes their export renames, and
REPORTS what it could not match instead of adding it: an unmatched
confirmation is a question about the log, not a contact to create.
Also logs and reports how many rows a delete actually removed -- silence
there made a delete that did nothing indistinguishable from one that
worked.
After an import that inserted instead of updating, there was no way to
ask which records it created: an import of old contacts carries old QSO
dates, so it hides among them. created_at is the only column that knows,
and it was not filterable.
Listed as a date column so a bare YYYY-MM-DD compares on the date part,
like qso_date.
The QSL Info tab knew every upload service except the newest one, so a
contact uploaded to HAMLOG.online could be edited everywhere but there.
It is stored in the ADIF extras rather than QSO columns -- like the
OpsLog card -- hence a channel of its own instead of a CONFIRMATIONS
entry, but it gets the ordinary sent/received/date editor because it
behaves like QRZ.com or Club Log, not like a printed card.
Its four columns move from the QSL group to Uploads for the same reason:
QSL is for cards, an upload service belongs with the upload services.
Same reasoning as the selected-rows export: ExportADIFFiltered was called
with includeAppFields=false, so a filtered export lost the award
references. A second entry, next to the standard one.
The right-click export always called ExportADIFSelected with
includeAppFields=false, so it wrote strictly standard ADIF. That is the
right default when the file is going to another logger, but it silently
drops every APP_ tag -- and an award reference such as RDA@KR-04 lives in
APP_OPSLOG_AWARDREFS and nowhere else. Backing up a selection, or moving
it to another OpsLog, lost the awards.
Adds a second entry rather than a flag on the first: the two exports
answer different questions, and a checkbox in a context menu would have
to be read before every export.
A log imported from HAMLOG.online carries the Russian district in CNTY, and the
offline RDA database has its own answer for the same contact. Which wins is a
real question — but only if the two are independent. If HAMLOG's value is itself
a lookup in the same kind of database, there is nothing to arbitrate and a
precedence rule would be ceremony around a redundancy.
So this measures instead of deciding: Settings → RDA gains a read-only compare
that reports agreements, disagreements, and the contacts where only one side
knows, then lists the disagreements — callsign, date, both districts, whether
the database answer was a DATED record (the award administrators' own fact) or
the callsign's current district (an assumption), and whether the QSO is
confirmed on HAMLOG (their value has then been through a match of two logs).
It changes nothing in the log. What to do about a conflict is the next decision,
and it should be taken with the operator's own numbers in hand.
Also: the four HAMLOG fields become filterable, so 'never sent there' is a
filter rather than a guess. A field that can be written and not read back is
half a feature — pinned by a test against the bulk-editable list.
A real record from their export settles it:
<CALL:4>RL6M … <CNTY:5>RO-19 <APP_HAMLOG_R150COUNTRY:6>Russia
<APP_HAMLOG_QSO_CFM:1>Y
The confirmation lives in APP_HAMLOG_QSO_CFM. The four names guessed before a
file was available — APP_HAMLOG_QSL and friends — were all wrong, which is the
argument for reading one rather than reasoning about it.
So that becomes the canonical key everywhere: the award source, the row colours,
the grid column and the bulk editor. Importing a log downloaded from HAMLOG now
carries its confirmations into OpsLog with nothing to rename. The older names,
including the APP_OPSLOG_HAMLOG_QSL that OpsLog itself wrote in the meantime,
are still honoured on read so nothing already stamped stops counting.
Preferences → Confirmations gains a HAMLOG.online row, sent and received, with
the same defaults every other service has: a new QSO can start at N so the
backlog is meaningful from the first contact. The defaults reach it through a
new setExtraDefault — fill() writes through a pointer to a string field and
these two live in the extras map, which no pointer reaches.
The QSO grid gains four HAMLOG columns (status and date, both directions),
hidden by default: a column per service shown to everyone is how a grid becomes
unreadable.
And the paragraph explaining what "Sent" means is gone from that page.
Bulk edit offered two HAMLOG fields, both dates, and the first question they
drew was the right one: which of these is the status? Collapsing the flag into
the date was neat in the storage and a riddle in the dialog, where the eight
fields above it are four status/date pairs.
So four keys now — APP_OPSLOG_HAMLOG_SENT / _SENT_DATE and _QSL / _QSL_DATE —
and four fields, in the shape an operator already reads for eQSL, QRZ, Club Log
and HRDLog. The stamp written after a successful upload follows: Y in the
status, the day in the date.
Nothing else changes: the QSL Manager's backlog still asks whether the sent key
is present, and the award engine still treats any non-N value in the QSL key as
a confirmation.
A log sent to hamlog.online by hand — an ADIF exported from OpsLog and dropped
on their site — had no way of being marked as sent afterwards. The QSL Manager
then listed every one of those contacts as backlog and offered to upload them a
second time.
Both HAMLOG keys join the bulk-editable extras, so a selection (or the whole
log) can be stamped in one pass. They are DATES rather than Y/N flags because
that is the shape the sent stamp already uses: the QSL Manager's backlog asks
whether the key is present, and a date also says when it went.
The test pins that they are reachable through the extras path and NOT offered as
columns — a mapping claiming both would write to a table that has neither.
The upload targets in the QSO context menu gain HAMLOG.online, so a selection
goes there the same way it goes to QRZ or LoTW.
The confirmation toast now names the service from a map rather than a chain of
ternaries that stopped after three: hrdlog, eqsl and hamlog were echoed as their
internal ids, which is not what the operator clicked on.
An upload now leaves a trace on the QSO: APP_OPSLOG_HAMLOG_SENT holds the day
it went. The date rather than a Y, so a log says WHEN — and so one shape serves
three readers: eligibility (a stamped QSO is not sent twice), the QSL Manager's
backlog, and the appearance rules' sent channel.
HAMLOG joins the QSL Manager's service list. It has no status column to select
on, so its backlog is the ABSENCE of that extras key — a LIKE over the extras
JSON, which is a full scan and is the right trade here: it answers a button an
operator presses, and the alternative is a promoted column for a field no other
program would ever read. The match is on the quoted key, so a QSO whose comment
merely mentions the text is not taken for one already sent — which is what the
test pins.
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.
HAMLOG.online is a seventh external service: one API key, one ADIF record per
QSO, immediate / delayed / on-close like the rest. They publish no API
documentation, so the protocol is read from THEIR OWN client — the HAMLOG Agent
(github.com/hamlogonline/Agent), which is the authoritative source short of
asking them:
POST https://hamlog.online/api/agent/
{"ADIFADD": {"APIKEY": k, "ADIFDATA": record}} → {"STATUS":"OK"}
{"KEYSTATUS": {"APIKEY": k}} → {"STATUS":"OK","CALLSIGN":…}
Success is STATUS == OK, not "no ERROR field": their failure carries ERROR and
no STATUS, and reading an unknown reply — a proxy page, a maintenance notice —
as an acceptance is how a contact goes missing without anyone noticing.
KEYSTATUS buys something no other service here offers: the key can be checked
BEFORE the first QSO, and the answer names the account. A key pasted from
another callsign is caught in the settings panel rather than through a week of
silent refusals.
Their confirmations are also an award source now, ticked like LoTW rather than
expressed through "custom". It reads the ADIF extras, not a column: the standard
names a field for hamlog.EU and none for hamlog.ONLINE, and borrowing the other
site's field would write a falsehood into every exported log. Three plausible
key names from their own export are accepted too, so nobody has to rename a
column by hand after an export.
Yaesu gains antenna selection (AN), remembered per band — the antenna picked on
a band comes back with it, with no table to fill in anywhere. Rigs with one
socket never answer AN and never show the row; the log says which case it is.
And a serial port that is refused now names its likely holder. OmniRig stays
resident once activated and keeps the port of the rig configured in it, so a
native backend never gets it — "Serial port busy" alone accused nobody, and an
FTDX10 spent a morning being blamed for it.
An Icom reached over the LAN streams its receive audio through the Icom
protocol, and Windows sees no sound card for it at all — the audio settings
could only offer the PC's own microphone, so "From radio" had nothing right to
point at and the QSO recorder had nothing to record. The recorder now accepts a
PUSHED source: the decoded stream goes to the speakers and to the recorder
alike, with no virtual cable to set up. Which source it uses follows the CAT
backend, and it is restarted only when that answer changes, so an ordinary
settings save never cuts a recording in half.
OmniRig no longer sends SetSimplexMode to a Yaesu when tuning. It is a silent
no-op on some — an FT-891 logged OK on every spot click while FreqA never
moved — and actively harmful on others. From an FT-2000 log, one QSY:
Vfo="AB"(0x80) Split=0x10000 (off) the operator's state
Vfo="BA"(0x100) Split=0x8000 (ON) after SetSimplexMode
The rig-agnostic "receive and transmit HERE, simplex" call turned split on and
moved reception to VFO B. OpsLog then displayed B — reading the radio correctly,
after having moved it itself. Icom is untouched: there the call is the
authoritative one and the direct write is unreliable.
Also:
- the NEW county badge shows in the entry form itself, inside the field,
where the operator is deciding whether to call.
- the basemap buttons clear the zoom controls; Light sat a few pixels from
the minus button and was being clicked by mistake.
- French cluster status: DÉJÀ CTC reads DÉJÀ QSO.
Panadapter spots are now worth reading. The comment carries the spotter, the
entity and the status in DXHunter's own shape — "CQ up 2 [F4BPO] [Franz Josef
Land] [New Slot]" — which needed two things nothing documents: SmartSDR splits
its command line on SPACES, so the words ran together until every space became
non-breaking; and it truncates past ~60 characters, so the cluster's own words
are trimmed first and the three brackets always survive. RBN column padding is
collapsed on the way in, or a preserved run of spaces opened a gap wide enough
to push the rest off screen.
"Already worked" means the CALLSIGN is in the log, not the entity: saying it of
a station never contacted was simply wrong. Each status can also be kept off the
panadapter entirely, and the WSJT-X decode spots obey the same switches — the
palette governs the panadapter, not one of the two things that feed it.
And the radio is no longer hammered: a spot whose frequency, colour and comment
are unchanged is not removed and redrawn. A busy skimmer feed re-spots the same
station every few seconds; one two-minute session sent 2128 adds, 88 of them for
a single callsign, and the display did not move a pixel for any of them.
CI-V, from an IC-7850 that kept killing JTDX: a reply the rig sent to another
controller on the same bus is no longer taken for ours, and a set_ptt, set_freq
or set_mode whose acknowledgement goes missing is verified by reading the rig
back instead of being reported as a failure. WSJT-X and JTDX answer a failed
command with a Rig Control Error and drop the link mid-over — 98 keyings, 6 lost
acknowledgements, 2 dropped connections in one session. The check waits 700 ms,
not the poll's 150: the rig has just failed to answer twice because it was
retuning, and a short probe would fail for the same reason.
Auto-call is withdrawn — it duplicated DXHunter, which already answers decodes,
and two programs deciding that from one shack key over each other. The library
is kept whole and dormant; a guard in App.tsx makes sure a stored preference
cannot key a transmitter whose switch no longer exists.
Also:
- the log rotates while running, not only at startup: the CI-V trace left on
wrote 416 MB and nothing would have stopped it before the disk did. Closing
it now releases the crash file too — the runtime keeps its own duplicate.
- the interface zoom announces itself, with a badge, a click back to 100% and
a View menu; Ctrl+wheel and Ctrl+0 always worked and nothing said so.
- no more elastic bounce, and no swipe-to-navigate out of the app.
- Edit QSO: your own TX power and the contacted station's extended locator
were saved and written back with no box to set them.
- FT decodes: continents are a multiple choice; a compound MSHV message that
answers two stations in one line is recognised as addressed to you.
Ultrabeam on a serial port never worked, and three faults were stacked so
each hid the next:
- Stop() did not wait for the poll loop, so a stopped client kept the COM
port. Every later client then failed with "Serial port busy" — the
program holding it being OpsLog itself.
- startUltrabeam tore the old client down CONCURRENTLY with starting the
new one, and "Test connection" built a second client on a port already
ours. Harmless over TCP, fatal on a port with one owner.
- A silent serial port returns (0, nil) and bufio retries that a hundred
times: a 4 s timeout became ~7 minutes of a frozen poll loop logging
nothing.
The controller then answered at once. Confirmed on hardware: the USB cable
presents TWO COM ports, only the second reaches the controller, and only at
19200 baud — so the speed is pinned in code (an FTDI cable opens at any
speed, and a wrong one is indistinguishable from a dead controller) and the
port field says which one to pick. The first exchange after each connect is
hex-dumped, which separates silence from a wrong baud from a misread frame.
Databases now carry only the tables their role needs. Every target used to
get the whole migration set, so a shared MySQL logbook grew settings and
station_profiles tables nothing ever wrote to — an operator inspecting the
server could not tell which copy was authoritative. Statements are filtered
by role, unknown tables are kept in both (fail-safe), and existing databases
are cleaned once, dropping only EMPTY tables. Settings → Database gains a
Compact button, since SQLite frees pages inside the file and never shrinks it.
Also:
- Awards: the callsigns behind a cell open the QSL Manager on Paper QSL,
searched, ready for the card dates.
- The record button no longer goes missing after an update: whether manual
recording is possible is a per-profile question that was asked once, at
startup, before the profile was known.
- Alert rules and filter presets confirm that they were saved.
- Spot clicks on the radio panadapter carry the POTA park into F3.
- The build gate is re-checked wherever the active callsign can change; it
ran at startup alone, and a fresh install has no callsign then.
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.
The grid-square map drew the world two or three times across a wide window, each
copy carrying the same squares — worldCopyJump earns its keep on the great-circle
map, where a path reads better crossing a second Asia, and costs only confusion
on a map of where you have been heard. It is off here, the tiles no longer wrap,
and addBasemap takes the option so the other map is untouched.
Zooming out far enough to hold Greenland and Antarctica together was impossible:
the floor was zoom 1, and one step further out was already too far. Zoom 0 is
the whole planet, and the view now opens on a fitWorld computed from the
container rather than a guessed zoom level — repeated once when the container
first has a real size, because the tab is mounted hidden.
That exposed the next thing: Esri answers a request outside the world with a grey
"Map data not yet available" tile, and zoomed out that was most of the screen.
The tile layers carry a bounds, so those tiles are never asked for, and what is
left beside the planet is the panel's own background instead of a white slab.
Finally the mode filter offers All, Phone and CW beside Digital and FTx. The
backend already accepted all of them — GridSquares understands "ALL" and the
ModeClass names — only the interface was offering two.
Choosing "no field" cleared the primary field and hid the matching controls —
but the fallback OR rules stayed in the definition and went on scanning their
own fields. An RDA award declared to match nothing still found a district in the
QTH, and the panel no longer showed the rule doing it. Only a manual override on
the same QSO kept the wrong reference out of the log.
So the choice now clears the fallbacks too, which is what its label promises,
and a rule that survives — from an imported definition, a shared template — is
rendered even in "no field" mode. Nothing that still runs may be invisible.
No catalogue award pairs an empty field with OR rules, so nothing shipped
changes behaviour.
Pressing Save in Preferences tore down the CAT link and the shared CAT server
unconditionally. Two consequences an operator sees at once: WSJT-X and JTDX are
thrown off their rig mid-QSO with an error box, and every spot disappears from a
FlexRadio panadapter — a Flex reconnect clears them by design, so the wipe on
save was the reconnect, not a stray command. Switching profile re-applies the
same settings and did exactly the same.
Two signatures decide it now. catLinkSig covers what shapes the physical link
(backend, host/port, COM port and baud, CI-V address, network credentials);
catShareSig covers the protocol and port of the rigctl/TCI server, which is the
socket WSJT-X actually holds. Same string in, same connection out, so there is
nothing to gain by rebuilding it. The poll interval, command delay, transverter
offset and spot options are applied to the running manager as before — the tests
pin that a spot option in particular can never trigger a reconnect, since that
is the one that would wipe the panadapter.
Also, two things the log would not say:
- WSJT-X/JTDX report their Enable Tx state in every Status and we wrote it
nowhere. When a station is called and nothing goes out, that flag is the whole
answer — a Reply does what a double-click does, it cannot arm a transmitter —
and the only way to see it was to watch a button in another window. Logged on
change, so it costs a few lines a QSO.
- The antenna log said "steppir connected" before anything had talked to it,
which made an unopenable serial port look like a working link with tracking
switched off. It says "configured", which is what it knows.
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.
Every station on an already-worked band was flagged NEW MODE.
A WSJT-X Decode does not carry the mode's name. It carries the
one-character marker from the decode line - "~" for FT8, "+" for FT4 - and
that character was passed straight through as though it were a mode. The
status resolver then compared "~" against the modes worked for the entity,
matched nothing, and concluded the mode had never been worked. Same cause
put "~ -07" in the comment of every decode spot pushed to the FlexRadio
panadapter, which nobody had traced back.
Resolved through a marker table, with the mode from the sender's last
Status as the fallback - Status is the message that carries the real name.
So an unlisted or future marker degrades to correct rather than to
nonsense, and a sender that puts the name in the field directly is believed
as-is. With neither available the mode is left empty, which makes the
resolver answer "worked": the safe side, since a wrong mode invents a
new-mode flag exactly as the marker did.
An FT decodes panel fed by the inbound UDP link: every decode from WSJT-X,
JTDX or MSHV, grouped by T/R period, with the new-entity flags the cluster
already computes and the operator's own transmissions threaded into the
slots they went out in. Clicking a line answers the station through a
WSJT-X Reply, routed to the instance that heard it.
Available both as a closable tab and as a Main-view pane.
STATION_CALLSIGN was the one field the option deliberately skipped, on the
grounds that stamping the active call could re-route a mixed-call log.
That protected nothing. The same option already writes this profile's grid,
rig, antenna, city and postal address onto every record it finds blank — it
has assumed "this log is mine" long before it reaches the callsign. And the
thing that actually keeps a multi-op log intact is that a record CARRYING a
station callsign is never touched, which has always been true and still is.
Withholding it only meant the option quietly failed on the one field an
operator goes and checks afterwards, leaving imported QSOs with no station
call at all — invisible in the ADIF they export, and unroutable for LoTW
and Club Log.
Counted and logged: "did it fill the callsign?" is the first question after
an import, and the log is where it gets answered.
Compared side by side, DXHunter's decode list is plainly easier to read,
and three things account for the gap.
The Call column repeated what the message already said. Every FT8 line
opens with the callsigns — "CQ A93MO LL56", "PG5FRL JH3CUL PM74" — so a
column in front of it printed the same token twice and pushed the line
everyone actually reads to the middle of the row. It is gone; the message
is the identity, and the tokens worth finding are picked out inside it:
green for CQ and for our own call when someone answers, red for the station
we are calling. The grid went with it, being the message's last token.
Time is on every row now, compact, no separators. A decode belongs to a
period and the section heading names it — but once a slot runs past a
screenful the heading is somewhere above, and an instant you cannot read
where the decode is is not an instant you have.
Band and mode became their own columns, band as a chip, and the status
flags moved into one column at the right edge with LoTW and a "worked"
marker beside them. Rows are tighter: 13 px for the message and the report,
11 px for the figures, 10 px for the badges, and the column rules run
through the lot.
The embedded key was registered to XV9Q, not to OpsLog. Not a cosmetic
detail: Club Log identifies the client software by that key, so every
OpsLog upload in the world was attributed to that callsign. Its owner
received the abuse warning OpsLog earned when the on-close sweep was still
posting hundreds of QSOs through the realtime endpoint - and a revocation
aimed at them would have cut Club Log uploads for every user of this
program at once.
G7VJR issued a key for "OpsLog" on request. Same mechanism, same UX: the
key identifies the software, the operator still supplies their own e-mail
and password, so it authorises nothing on its own.
Club Log asks that it not be published in source code. The source is on a
private remote and only the built exe is released, but it remains
recoverable from that binary by anyone who looks - as it is for every
logger that embeds one. It is an identifier that can be attributed, not a
secret.
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.
A countdown for the T/R slot, against the UTC clock — a bar, the seconds
left, and the mode. Slots are anchored to UTC rather than to when OpsLog
started, so it is computed from the wall clock alone and keeps running when
the band is dead and there is nothing to group. The last fifth of a slot
turns amber: that is when a decode is imminent and an operator deciding
whether to answer has run out of time to think.
Which exposed a real fault in the grouping. Status reports the T/R period
as a whole number of seconds, so FT4 arrives as 7 or 8 depending on which
way the sender rounded, and the code floored to whole seconds on top of
that — two FT4 periods landed in one heading and others were split down the
middle. The slot length now comes from the MODE, which knows the exact
figure and the whole halving family (FT8 15, FT4 7.5, FT2 3.75), with the
sender's number only as a fallback; and the arithmetic is in milliseconds.
Sub-second slots get a decimal in their heading, or two FT4 periods inside
one second would print the same time twice.
Two rows now stand out from the band behind them, because they are not
about the band at all but about the QSO in progress:
- the station being called is red, taken from the transmit state, so it
can be found in a slot holding thirty others;
- anyone ANSWERING is green and labelled, which outranks everything else
on the screen. A reply is a decoded line that opens with our own
callsign — bracketed too, since a non-standard call comes back
compressed.
EY35S went on showing NEW SLOT for the rest of the half hour it stayed in
the list, five minutes after the QSO was in the log.
A decode's verdict is resolved once, when it arrives, and then read from
the shared status cache for ever. The cache IS refreshed after a QSO is
logged - but refreshSpotStatuses only ever re-queried the cluster spots, so
no decoded callsign was in the batch. And the decodes tab was not in the
"is anything showing a status?" test, so logging a QSO while looking at
this very panel only marked the cache dirty and waited for the cluster or
the band map to be opened.
Both fixed: decoded stations join the refresh batch, deduplicated by
call+band+mode so half an hour of a busy band is a few hundred queries the
backend answers with one pass of the log, and the tab counts as visible.
Second, worse bug found on the way. The cache is pruned back to the live
spots once it outgrows twice the spot cap - keeping only keys present in
the cluster list. Decodes share that cache and are exactly what pushes it
past the cap, so on a busy band the panel would have wiped every one of its
own badges the moment it filled up. Decoded stations now count as live.
Clicking a decode now ANSWERS it. It sends WSJT-X/MSHV a Reply message
(type 4), which is the same thing as double-clicking the line in their own
Band Activity window: the application looks the decode up, sets its
transmit frequency to the caller's and starts the exchange.
It deliberately does not tune the radio, which is what it did before and
why nothing happened. On FT8 the whole band sits inside one passband, so
moving the dial changes nothing about who gets answered - the decision
belongs to the decoding application, and the Reply is the only way to hand
it over. Tuning would also just fight it for the VFO. The entry is still
filled so the QSO can be logged here.
The reply is routed by PROGRAM ID, not by listener: two receivers can share
one multicast group, and answering a station heard on the 6 m instance by
talking to the 20 m one would start a call on the wrong band. It goes to
the address that instance's packets actually arrive from - a multicast
listener must answer the sender, never the group. WSJT-X matches the reply
against its own decode list, so the payload replays the decode field for
field: time, snr, delta time, audio offset, mode and message text.
Two columns added, DT and Freq - the audio offset inside the passband, not
the RF frequency, which is the same for every station in the list and says
nothing. Past about two seconds DT takes a warning tint: that station is
drifting out of the window.
The transmit strip. "You cannot see what you are sending, or who you are
calling" - two separate faults. The message was only ever threaded into its
period, and in FT8 you transmit in the slots you are NOT receiving in, so
its period had no decodes and the whole line was dropped; a transmit slot
now creates its period. And the state is a strip of its own at the top,
because it is the one thing on the screen that is about the operator rather
than the band. It is fed by every Status rather than only by one carrying
transmit text, so it can still name the station being called on MSHV and
older JTDX builds, which stop before tx_message in the Status payload.
"New only" became per-category badges, in the colours and the vocabulary of
the Chase New panel. None lit shows the whole band - this is a decode log
first, and a panel that opened by hiding most of the traffic would be lying
about what is on the air.
Three things from reading it on a real screen.
Column rules. The grid alone was not enough to follow a line across: cells
now carry a right border and the row stretches, so the rules run unbroken
from the header to the bottom of the list. That is what turns rows of text
into a table.
Left-aligned. The previous pass centred the grid inside a maximum width,
which on a wide screen opened a dead margin down the left before the first
callsign - trading the hole in the middle for a bigger one at the edge. Now
it fills the width and the slack lands in the message column, which is the
one that can use it and the one bounded by rules on both sides, so it reads
as a cell rather than a gap.
"CQ CQ PE1NAO JO32" - a green CQ badge in front of a message whose own
first word is CQ. The badge is gone; the word already in the line is picked
out instead, which scans the same and stutters not at all.
First pass on the panel from operating feedback.
Columns are a grid template shared by the header row and every data row, so
the two cannot drift and the eye has a rail to follow. It is capped at
1500 px and centred: free-flowing, a 2500 px window put the country a foot
from the callsign it belonged to and left a hole in the middle of every
line.
"New" gets a COLUMN. It was only a coloured edge before, which says
something is special without saying what — and every one of these is a
reason to break off what you are doing and call. The entity verdict is a
solid badge, the orthogonal ones (park, grid, prefix, county) are outlined
in the colours markerColour already gives the cluster list and the band
map, so a new park is the same green in all three. Applied inline because
those are categorical --chart-* custom properties, which the theme does not
expose as Tailwind colour utilities: written as border-chart-7 the badge
would simply have had no colour.
Band and mode selectors now appear only when the feed actually carries more
than one of each. One MSHV is one band and one mode, so for most operators
they were furniture; they show up the day a second instance puts a second
band on the link, which is the only day they mean anything. Same rule for
continent, and a receiver count when more than one instance is feeding.
Added a LoTW-only filter, and raised the type throughout (call and message
to 14 px, secondary to 12 px, badges to 11 px) with more room per row.
The decode payload now carries the sending application's own id. It tells
two receivers apart on one multicast group — and it is the address a
WSJT-X Reply message would have to go back to, so it is carried now rather
than requiring another trip through the parser later.
Every FTx decode WSJT-X, JTDX or MSHV puts on the wire, grouped by T/R
period. Optional and closable, from Tools -> FT decodes; its open state is
remembered, because an operator running digital modes leaves it open for
the session rather than consulting and closing it.
The period is the point, and what separates this from the cluster list.
FT8 is a sequence of fifteen-second slots and a band is read by watching
them go by: who called CQ this slot, who answered, what I was sending while
they did. A flat list sorted by time loses exactly that, so the list is
grouped one section per period, newest first, with the operator's own
transmission shown inside the slot it went out in.
Three fields had to be carried up from the wire to make it possible:
- the decode's OWN timestamp, which the parser read and threw away. It is
what assigns a slot: a period's decodes arrive in one burst a second or
two after it closes, so arrival time piles a whole period into the next
one. Rebuilt to UTC from milliseconds-since-midnight, with the
day-boundary case handled - a decode stamped 23:59:58 arriving at
00:00:01 would otherwise be dated a day ahead and sit at the top of the
list for the rest of the session.
- the decoded line itself. The exchange is what says where a station is in
a QSO, and no set of extracted fields reads like "R-09" does.
- tx_message and transmitting from Status, which nothing parsed before.
Recorded once per message rather than on every Status, which repeats it
about once a second for the whole over.
Also picked up on the way: is_new, low_confidence, off_air, the operator's
own call and grid, and the T/R period itself - better authority on slot
length than the mode name, which says nothing about a custom period. The
Status tail is read defensively: those fields were appended over successive
schema versions and JTDX and MSHV each stop at their own point, so a short
packet is normal and keeps whatever parsed.
Status flags come from ClusterSpotStatuses, the resolver the cluster list
and band map already use, filling the same cache. One verdict per call:
"new band" in this panel and plain worked in the cluster two seconds later
would be worse than no flag at all. Clicking a call goes through the same
handler as a cluster spot, so answering a station is one gesture whether it
came off telnet or off the receiver.
Filters: CQ only, new-anything only, band, mode, continent, an SNR floor
and a free search. The band, mode and continent choices are built from what
is actually on the feed - offering 160 m to a station whose receivers are
all on 6 m is noise.
Decodes are held in the frontend and pruned to a rolling half hour: they
are a live view, not data, nothing outside the panel reads them, and a
night of FT8 on 20 m would otherwise grow a list no filter can rescue.
Arrivals are staged on a 300 ms timer so a period landing as fifty packets
costs one status lookup and one render.
Extends to frequency and mode what PTT already had. A missing FB is not a
missing command: the rig acts on the frame as it decodes it, and what
expires is our wait for the answer, on a bus shared with the rig's own
transceive updates. JTDX in "Split: Fake It" moves the dial and the mode
immediately before every key-down, so those acks queue behind each other.
Losing one is fatal to the client rather than merely untidy: rigctld answers
RPRT -9, JTDX reads that as losing rig control and tears the connection down
mid-over. An operator's log shows three set_freq failures and one set_mode,
each followed within 300 ms by a fresh rigctld client -- and shows the PTT
resend rescuing an over that would otherwise have ended there.
Opt-in per caller rather than folded into exec: only a command that says
"be in this state" can be repeated safely, and a relative one must never
come through here.
The acknowledgement loss itself is still unexplained. Every failure in that
log is preceded by a state read reporting SSB on a rig in DATA, which points
at CI-V frame desync rather than a slow rig, and needs a trace to pin down.
The trx handler stamped its PTT cache BEFORE commanding the radio and left
it in place when the command failed. An operator running JTDX over TCI with
an Icom on CI-V lost an un-key to a lost acknowledgement: the cache recorded
"off" regardless, and from then on every trx:0,false was dismissed as a
repeat of a state the radio had never reached. The cache is per-server, not
per-connection, so reconnecting JTDX changed nothing either -- the
transmitter stayed keyed into the amplifier, with no drive, until the radio
was switched off by hand.
The cache is now written only on success, and a failure clears "known"
outright so the next command reaches the radio whatever it is.
Second guard: releasePTT drops a PTT this server asserted when the client
disconnects, and when the server stops -- before the CAT backend goes down,
while the rig is still reachable. rigctld has had that since a K3 sat in
transmit for 29 s; the TCI server was written without it, so an operator
moving from Hamlib to TCI silently lost the protection. A later log shows
the rig keyed for 40 s across a JTDX reconnect for exactly that reason.
The PH/CW/DIG grid in the Stats panel is the fastest read in the app and its
palette was fixed per theme. Settings -> Appearance now offers the six: the
four status fills, the never-worked fill, and the ring on the cell being
entered.
Stored as OVERRIDES, not as a palette. Each of the twelve themes ships an
--mx-* ramp tuned to its own background, so an operator who only wants a
different green must not thereby freeze the other four to the theme they
happened to be using that day. An empty value means "whatever the theme
says"; the chosen ones are stamped inline on <html>, where they win over
every theme; switching the feature off hands the colours straight back.
The pickers are seeded from what the matrix is painting at that moment
rather than from a fixed palette, so the choice starts from the colours in
front of the operator. A new --mx-cur token carries the current-entry ring:
it follows --warning by default, so it stays theme-correct on all twelve,
but can be recoloured without dragging every other warning in the app along.
The legend under the matrix and its cell tooltips were hardcoded English.
They now go through t() with the same keys as the pickers, so the grid and
the settings cannot disagree about which green is which.
HTTPS to a relay board could not work. Nearly every board that offers it signs
its own certificate — there is no authority anywhere that could have signed it —
so the request failed verification before it left.
A checkbox, per board, off by default. Not a blanket switch, because the other
HTTPS case is real and opposite: a board reached from outside through a proxy
with a genuine certificate, where verification is the only thing standing
between an antenna switch and the internet. Same setting, two boards, different
answers.
Off by default is only safe if the failure explains itself, so a certificate
error now names the box to tick. Go's own "x509: certificate signed by unknown
authority" is accurate and tells an operator nothing about what to do next.
Shown only once an https:// URL is actually in the board's configuration. A
board on plain HTTP has no certificate to argue about, and an option that cannot
matter yet is one more thing to wonder about.
The flag joins the driver cache key: ticking it has to rebuild the driver, or
the cached one would go on refusing the certificate with the verifying client it
already holds.
The boards that take a bare host — WebSwitch, KMTronic — keep verification. An
https:// typed there is the proxy case by construction, since they default to
plain HTTP on the LAN.
Three tests against a real self-signed TLS server: accepted with the box,
refused with a message naming it without the box, and one board's setting not
leaking into another's.
Two faults in the combiner coupling, both reported from the operating position.
THE POWER LEVEL WAS NEVER COUPLED. ON, OFF and OPERATE fanned out to the group;
L/M/H did not — it was simply the command nobody had linked. Two combined
amplifiers left at different power levels feed the combiner unevenly, which is
the thing the coupling exists to prevent.
THE COMMANDS DID NOT LEAVE TOGETHER. The second amplifier was commanded only
once the first had answered, and an SPE answers over its own link in its own
time. The combiner heard power appear on one input before the other and beeped
about it, on every OFF and every ON.
Each target now gets a goroutine, all parked on one channel until every one is
ready; closing it releases them together. That is the difference between "start
one, then start the other" and "both leave at once" — they have separate clients
and separate connections, so nothing downstream re-serialises them.
It matters most on the power level, which is not one command at all: an SPE has
no "set level", so the driver taps the POWER key and waits for the amp to report
the new one before tapping again — up to three taps, up to two seconds each. One
after the other, the pair would sit at different levels for six seconds.
A single amplifier still runs inline: no goroutine, no barrier, nothing new to
go wrong for the operators who have one amp. The one that was clicked stays
first, because its failure is the one worth reporting.
Opening Station Control left the compass blank for a second or two while the
amplifiers, relay boards and power supply filled at once.
Nothing was slow. The status bar keeps the shared heading loop running, so when
the compass mounts there is already a tick pending — up to the full three-second
idle interval away — and the new subscriber simply waited out the rest of it.
The heading was known the whole time and had nowhere to be read from.
The last heading is now kept and handed to whoever subscribes next. That matters
more on the Alpha SPID this was reported on than it would elsewhere: every poll
is an open, a read at 600 baud and a close, so even fetching immediately on
mount would not have been immediate.
In a microtask, so a subscriber is never called back before subscribeRotorHeading
has returned to it.
The one field the editor would not let you touch, and the one that was wrong on
WAJA. Every other property of a reference — its name, pattern, entity list,
validity window — was editable; the code was rendered readOnly, so correcting a
number meant deleting all 47 references and importing a new list, throwing away
anything the operator had adjusted in it.
A rename in the store, not a delete plus an insert: everything the reference
carries travels with it, which is the whole point of correcting a number rather
than replacing an entry. A number already in use is refused — REPLACE INTO would
have let one reference silently swallow another, discovered much later as a
prefecture quietly missing from the list.
The typed code is held apart from the selection. The list and every field patch
key off the selected code, so editing it in place made the editor lose the
reference mid-edit.
SaveAwardReference now recomputes the log like Delete and Replace already did. A
reference's name is what the award column SHOWS for awards displaying by name,
and its pattern is part of what matches at all — so editing one changes rows,
and the grid was left showing the old label until something else happened to
trigger a pass.
Changelog: the three TCI-sharing lines are merged into one. The server and the
two fixes made to it while building are one unreleased feature, and an operator
only ever meets the finished thing. The TCI-client PTT line stays separate — it
is OpsLog driving a SunSDR, the other direction entirely.
The catalog carried Japan's civil prefecture code (JIS X 0401) — 01 Hokkaido,
02 Aomori, 03 Iwate, 04 Miyagi — where the award uses the JARL's own numbering.
The two agree on the first three prefectures and then part company on 35 of the
remaining 44: Tokyo is 10 to the JARL and 13 to the government, Niigata 08
against 15, Toyama 28 against 16.
The names were right throughout, which is why nothing looked wrong: the award
matches on the prefecture NAME in the QTH, so it counted exactly the right
contacts. Only the number against each one was wrong — and that number is what
an operator writes on a JARL claim.
Renumbered by name from the official JARL list, so everything else each entry
carried travels with it. That includes the Tokyo spelling pattern, which had to
move from 13 to 10; left where it was it would have been matching QTHs for
Saitama.
Two digits throughout, as the JARL prints them. Not cosmetic: the codes are
strings, so "1" sorts between "09" and "10" and the reference list appeared in
an order no published list uses.
Version 2 on the definition, so this actually reaches people. An operator who
has not edited WAJA gets it at startup; one who has is offered it, since their
work outranks ours. Nobody has to re-import by hand.
Reported with the official JARL chart alongside the exported award.
Audit prompted by "are we sure the commands are implemented — split, Fake It,
Split rig?". The rigctl server is complete and hardened; the TCI one, three days
old, had reintroduced a bug rigctld had already paid for.
A client working split says two things — where to transmit, and that split is
on — and nothing obliges it to say them in that order. A write to channel B
while the rig was still simplex was DISCARDED, on the sound principle that
preparing a transmit frequency is not a request to QSY. But then the split was
armed on whatever the transmit VFO held, which is the receive frequency: the
operator transmits straight onto the DX while their software shows exactly what
they asked for. The frequency is now remembered and used when the split arrives,
which is what rigctld does with set_split_vfo / set_split_freq.
Two more from the same source:
Asking for a split state the rig is already in touches nothing. A client in Fake
It uses no split but still says so to be sure, and answering an error to a
request that was already true is what made JTDX abandon a transmission a second
into the frame through the rigctl server.
A repeated PTT command is not re-sent. One client restated it sixteen times a
second, and the Flex's own "xmit 1" was overwritten between two of them inside a
millisecond. The same radio sits behind this server — the operator reporting
this is on the Flex API backend.
Fake It itself needs nothing but channel A, and now has a test saying so.
MSHV's PTT test does nothing against the TCI sharing server.
The initialisation block never carried TX_ENABLE. The document files it under
unidirectional control rather than initialisation, so it was missed when the
block was written from §4.1 — but its own note says it is "sent to the client
when connected", and that is the point: a client that models transmit
permission starts out assuming it may NOT transmit. Without it MSHV never even
tries, so nothing arrives to relay and there is nothing to see at either end.
Sent as true always. OpsLog is not what decides — the radio behind whichever
backend is connected does, and its refusal already travels back through SetPTT
into the log.
TX_FREQUENCY goes with it, at connect and whenever the transmit frequency
moves. It is the command a client showing "TX 14.200" reads; channel B alone
left that stale.
And every command a client sends is now logged. This is the only evidence there
will ever be about a program on someone else's machine: "the PTT test does
nothing" cannot be answered without knowing whether MSHV sent trx at all, and
in what form. Cheap — TCI is event-driven, a client speaks when the operator
does something — and capped at 200 lines per connection so one that does poll
cannot quietly fill the log.
If this was not the cause, the next report answers it in one line rather than
another round of guessing.
"PTT via CAT does nothing on TCI." What OpsLog sends is right — trx:0,true; is
the documented command and the same one the reference clients send — so the
command was going out and the radio was discarding it.
ExpertSDR announces transmit permission with TX_ENABLE: on connect, and again
whenever the band changes, "in case transmitter permission was changed" (§4.3).
While it is false the radio simply IGNORES trx. OpsLog never read that command,
so there was nothing in the log, nothing on screen, and a dead key.
Now the permission is tracked and SetPTT refuses out loud, naming where to look:
the frequency must be inside a transmit band and TX enabled in ExpertSDR. The
refusal travels the path that already exists — Manager.SetPTT to pttKey, which
logs it and hands it to the UI.
Silence is not a "no". A radio that never mentions TX_ENABLE — an older
ExpertSDR, or another program speaking TCI — is not treated as refusing: we key
and let it decide. Permission is also forgotten on connect, so a refusal
remembered from a band since left cannot block PTT until a restart.
This may not be the operator's own cause, and that is the other half of the
change: if it is not, the log now settles it in one line. cat: TCI: → trx:0,true;
present means the command left OpsLog and the radio ignored it for a reason it
has not told us; absent means the fault is on this side.
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.
QRZ carries <iota> only for the operators who filled it in, and most have not.
But for 99 entities the reference follows from the entity alone — a station in
Ascension is on AF-003 whatever its callbook record says — and the entity is
known for every callsign from cty.dat, with no callbook at all.
So this reaches the operator with no QRZ subscription and the station that has
never touched a callbook, and it lands before the contact is logged, which is
when a reference is worth having.
Filled ONLY when the callbook gave nothing: an operator who typed a reference
knows something a table cannot — an IOTA-heavy entity, a rare island being
activated — and that still wins, as does one picked by hand on the entry.
The table is the IOTA programme's own dxcc_matches_one_iota.json, which lists
exactly the entities that map to ONE reference. France is not among them: a
French station is usually on the mainland and on no island, and guessing would
put a reference on hundreds of contacts that earn none.
Held as a table rather than a download — 3.5 kB that changes when an entity
appears, so fetching it daily would buy nothing and would fail exactly where a
portable station usually is. The header says where it came from and how to
refresh it.
Follows 747c2b9 and eab11db, which read the callbook's own tag.
Spot mirroring drew the same station two or three times, a few hertz apart.
Not a loop in the spot pipeline — one cluster line produces exactly one
SendSpot. It is that a popular DX station IS spotted two or three times, by
different operators inside the same minute, and no two of them agree on the
frequency to better than a few tens of hertz. This backend assumed ExpertSDR
replaced a spot bearing a callsign it already held, and said so in a comment;
it keys on the frequency too, so each of those became its own marker and stayed.
The FlexRadio backend has always done this properly (spot remove before spot
add, "one live spot per call"). TCI now does the same: the frequency drawn for
each call is remembered, a re-spot within 500 Hz sends nothing at all, and one
further away deletes the old marker before drawing the new one — so a station
that really moves still moves, instead of collecting markers.
SPOT_DELETE was not in the protocol document this backend was written from.
Confirmed before use against ars-ka0s/eesdr-tci, an independent TCI library that
lists SPOT with 5 arguments, SPOT_DELETE with 1 and SPOT_CLEAR with 0 — the
other two matching exactly what already works here, which is what makes the
third trustworthy.
The memory is cleared where Connect sends spot_clear. Left standing, it would
suppress the next spot for every remembered call as "already drawn" onto a
panorama the radio had just emptied — spots would quietly stop appearing after
a reconnect until each station changed frequency.
Five tests on the decision, which is split out from SendSpot so it can be
checked without a radio.
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.
withIOTARef was applied inside fillFromLastQso, the backfill that runs when the
provider came up short. That function returns early when there is no previous
contact with the callsign — so the island reference appeared for stations
already worked and never for the new one calling from the island, which is the
entire point of reading QRZ's <iota>.
Moved to the provider result in runLookup, where the rest of the callbook fields
are applied. The precedence is unchanged: a reference the operator typed or
picked still wins over the callbook.
Reported on F5IRH, Le Palais, Belle-Île-en-Mer — EU-048 in the QRZ record, and
nothing on the IOTA award.
No changelog line: the feature has not shipped yet, so the entry already in the
0.25.7 block now describes what it does.
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.
Reported with the evidence side by side: a QRZ record plainly carrying
<iota>EU-048</iota>, and no IOTA on the entry.
Adding a field to the lookup cache leaves every row already in it without that
field — and the cache lasts thirty days. So the change worked perfectly for a
callsign never looked up before, and did nothing at all for one already cached,
which is every callsign an operator actually works.
A row written before the column existed has NULL there, and is now treated as
stale: one refetch per such callsign, the next time it is used.
NULL and "" had to be made to mean different things for that. Put no longer
passes the reference through nullable(), so an operator with NO island stores an
empty string — otherwise every ordinary callsign would look unwritten and
refetch for ever, turning a cache into a tax on every lookup. Both halves are
tested.
Same trap for web and zip, added the same way in 0026 and never noticed.
Correcting an over-design of my own. I had contacts given an identity in bulk
the first time synchronisation was switched on, and a full dedupe-key map of the
logbook rebuilt on every pass, both sized for 123 000 contacts.
Neither is needed, because the change log starts EMPTY. Contacts logged before
synchronisation was switched on are never in anyone's log and so are never
exchanged; an identity is stamped only on a contact that is actually logged,
edited or deleted from then on. Seeding a second machine with the existing
history is a one-time copy of the database or an ADIF import — not something
synchronisation should be doing, and not something it can do from a file that
starts empty.
One case survives, and it is why the dedupe key stays. Two machines can already
hold the SAME old contact, the second seeded by that copy or import, with
different row ids and no identity on either. The day one of them edits it, it
stamps an identity and sends a change naming it; the other has never seen that
identity and would insert a duplicate. Matching on the contact itself —
callsign, minute, band, mode, the importer's own key — recognises it.
So that became a targeted lookup through idx_qso_callsign, run only when an
identity is unknown, instead of a whole-table map rebuilt each pass. Rare work,
priced as rare work.
QRZ's XML carries <iota>EU-048</iota> for an operator on an island, and OpsLog
read past it. Wired end to end: the provider, the lookup cache (a column, like
web and zip before it), and the entry's award references.
It matters more here than the same field would for another award. There is no
live "who is on an island right now" feed anywhere — POTA has one and that is
what OpsLog matches spots against; SOTA has one behind conditions; IOTA
publishes only static lists. So the callbook record is the practical source, and
it is known BEFORE the contact is logged, which is when a reference is useful.
The reference goes in as an IOTA award reference, exactly as one picked by hand,
so the existing path carries it to the qso.iota column on save.
Two limits, both deliberate. A reference the operator typed or picked WINS: a
callbook entry can be years out of date, and the operator in front of the radio
has just been told where the station is. And the value must look like an IOTA
reference — two letters, a hyphen, three digits — because writing anything else
into the award makes a reference no list contains, which counts for nothing and
has to be found by hand later.
Two PCs exchanging changes through a folder must be able to name the SAME
contact in both logs. "the QSO with M0ABC at 14:32" is a guess and the two
machines can disagree about which row that is, so an edit or a deletion cannot
be addressed at all without an identity that travels with the record.
A real indexed column, not a key inside extras_json: the identity is resolved
once per incoming change, and scanning JSON for it would turn every sync into a
full read of a 120 000-QSO logbook. A column costs one migration; the JSON would
cost a scan every time. That was the decision to confirm, and it is confirmed.
It follows the award_refs pattern — read in selectCols, absent from columnList,
written only through its own methods. So an ordinary edit cannot clobber it,
which matters: another machine addresses the contact by that id, and losing it
makes the same QSO arrive again as a new one. Pinned by a test that saves an
edit with the field deliberately blanked.
Existing contacts are stamped in batches inside one transaction rather than one
commit each — on a remote MySQL the round trip dominates, and 120 000 commits is
the difference between a minute and an afternoon. And a dedupe-key map lets two
machines that already hold the same imported log recognise each other's contacts
instead of copying 120 000 of them across.
MySQL nearly lost its logbook to this. It cannot index a TEXT column without a
prefix length: the migration would fail with error 1170 and fail again on every
startup, with no way out from the interface. The translator only emits VARCHAR
for names listed by hand in varcharColumns. sync_uid is now listed — and a test
reads the migrations, works out which indexed columns are TEXT, and fails if the
list does not cover them, so the next one cannot reach a shared logbook.
The shape we agreed: each PC keeps its own local SQLite and they exchange
CHANGES through a folder the operator already has — Seafile, OneDrive, a NAS, a
USB stick. Not the database file: SQLite over SMB or NFS corrupts, and in WAL
mode the shared-memory index has no meaning across machines at all.
The rule that makes a shared folder safe is one writer per file, append only.
Each machine writes only its own <machine>.ndjson and never touches another's,
so a sync client that replicates whole files can never merge two writers into
one — there are never two. That is the exact opposite of putting the database
there, and it is why it works.
This is the half internal/offlineq deliberately refuses to be: its own doc says
"no mirror, no pull, no merge, no tombstones". All four are here.
Four decisions worth naming, each with a test:
Tombstones. A delete is a record. Without one, a QSO removed on the laptop comes
back on the next sync from the shack PC, for ever — and a contact logged again
after a deletion has to come back, which the ordering also has to allow.
Determinism. Last writer wins, ordered on (time, the writer's own counter, the
writer's id) — not on time alone. Two PCs' clocks are never equal, so a bare
timestamp is not even a total order: two machines merging the same pair in
different orders could reach different answers and disagree for ever. Skew still
decides WHICH edit wins and nothing can fix that; what this guarantees is that
every machine agrees on the winner.
Resumption. Readers resume at a byte offset, so a 40 000-contact file is read
once and thereafter only its tail — and the offset advances only past COMPLETE
lines, because a folder sync catches a file mid-upload sooner or later. A file
that SHRANK was replaced rather than appended to, and is re-read from the start.
Survivability. One unreadable line costs one record. A record stamped with a
FUTURE format version is skipped, never guessed at.
Core only: no UI and nothing wired to the logbook yet, so nothing is
user-visible and there is no changelog entry. Next is the sync_uid column, the
add/update/delete hooks and the settings panel.
Two faults behind one screenshot: 3Y0K, recorded in the log as Bouvet Island,
showing the Antarctica matrix.
SELECTING A QSO now shows what that QSO records. The panel asked WorkedBefore
with no DXCC hint, and a hint of zero makes the backend resolve the entity from
cty.dat and the ClubLog exceptions AS THEY ARE TODAY — right for a live contact,
wrong for one being looked at in the log. The repo's own "infer from past QSOs"
path never ran, because the hint was no longer zero by the time it got there.
Hence Antarctica, and "5 QSOs with this entity" against "11 with this call":
two different entities, one of them nobody had asked about. The selected row's
dxcc now travels with it and is passed as the hint.
Browsing the log shows what the log says, even where the log is wrong.
Correcting an entity stays a deliberate act — right-click, Update from ClubLog.
BACK-ENTERING A QSO now resolves the exception at the CONTACT'S date. An
exception carries a validity window and a DXpedition's window closes: 3Y0K typed
months later, with the activation's own date in the form, was resolved against
today, matched nothing, and fell back to cty.dat. Both callers pass the date
they already hold — the entry strip's, and in the editor the record's own.
The date is trusted to move the resolution BACKWARDS only. A half-typed
"2026-0" must not send the lookup to the year 20, and a mistyped future date
must not resolve against a window that has not opened; both fall back to now.
Midday rather than midnight, because a window given in whole days is inclusive
of its end date and 00:00 sits exactly on the boundary.
Reported from a photograph of a French screen: "Spot lifetime" and "Chase new
grids" still in English in the DX Cluster settings. Diffing the two dictionaries
turned up fifteen more — including the ENTIRE update panel, which is why an
operator who reads French had nothing in French to react to when a new version
appeared.
All seventeen translated. Both dictionaries now hold 2685 keys with no
difference either way.
Every user-visible string ships in both languages: that was a rule, and until
now only a rule. A test parses the two dictionary literals and compares their
keys, so the next one is caught by `go test` instead of by an operator
photographing their own screen. Verified it fails when a key is removed.
A key missing from one side is not a blank — it falls back to the key itself,
so the interface reads "clu.spotTtl" where a label belongs, or keeps the English
text, which looks deliberate and is not.
Reported from a screenshot: working ZA/OE8NDR, the worked-before list showed
ZA/IZ2DPX and ZA/IW2JOP beside him and the header counted all four as contacts
"with this call".
callMatch folded portable forms together by taking the part before the slash.
That is right when the slash carries a suffix — RK3DWA/3, RK3DWA/P are one
person — and exactly wrong when it carries a prefix: ZA/OE8NDR became the
station "ZA", and the predicate `callsign LIKE 'ZA/%'` then selected every other
visitor to Albania.
The operator's own call is now picked out properly: drop the known qualifiers
(P, M, MM, AM, QRP, a bare call-area digit) and of what remains take the longest
part — a country prefix is short by nature, ZA, F, KH6, VP2E, and a callsign is
not. The predicate matches the prefixed forms too, so ZA/OE8NDR and a plain
OE8NDR still find each other, which is the whole point of the fold.
A base under three characters falls back to an exact match: a malformed entry
must not produce a LIKE that selects half the logbook.
"In this award's scope but with no reference" needs a scope to be in. On a
worldwide reference award — POTA, SOTA, IOTA, WWFF — every contact anywhere
would qualify, so the backend returns nothing and the window says it found
nothing. The button was there regardless, and could only ever open that.
It now appears only for an award scoped to a DXCC entity, which is what the
help text underneath used to have to explain. Better than what I did first,
which was to make a useless screen fast.
Kept from that: the assign dropdown is searched rather than scrolled above 300
references, and the reference list is not fetched until there are rows to
assign it to. Both still bite on a scoped award with a long list — Russian
districts, the bigger European ones.
Reported as POTA: missing references, and it hangs.
The Missing-refs modal builds a dropdown of every reference the award has, one
menu item each. A POTA log with the park list imported holds tens of thousands
of them, and putting that many items in the DOM stops the window answering.
Russian districts and the bigger European lists are the same shape.
Two things, and the second is the sharper one.
The list is now searched rather than scrolled: above 300 references a filter box
appears beside the dropdown, and the menu renders at most that many, saying how
many it is holding back. Nobody scrolls to K-4521 — they type it.
And the modal no longer fetches the references at all until there is something
to assign them to. Missing-reference detection needs a DXCC scope, so a
worldwide award like POTA always has zero rows here and the modal says so — it
was loading every park behind that message, for a dropdown that could not be
used for anything. The freeze happened on a screen with nothing to offer.
Whether this is the freeze that was reported I cannot say from here; it is a
freeze on exactly that screen, for exactly that award.
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.
v0.25.6 went out with its nine entries; the block is byte-identical to the
tagged one. The version constants are left alone — the release script is the one
source that bumps them, and touching them here would make its "release commit
already exists" check misfire.
Asked for the wiki to catch up, and to be explicit — examples rather than
descriptions. New page and six rewritten sections.
Recent QSOs and Filters, the page named in the request: the right-click menu is
now a table of what every entry does, and the filter builder has five worked
multi-criteria filters written out field by field, each ending in what you then
do with the result. Including the distinction that prompted it — "export
selected" takes the highlighted rows, "export filtered view" takes every QSO the
filter matched, and after building a filter it is the second one you want. Plus
the traps: ADIF date format, and "is empty" not being "equals N".
Connections (new): the page for a settings section that had none. What OpsLog
listens to and sends, which outbound row another logger actually wants — a
logger asking for "WSJT-X UDP" discards a bare ADIF record — the custom-message
triggers with their placeholder lists, three worked examples, and the port-clash
warning that produced this week's CAT-drop report.
Amplifiers and Switches: the generic HTTP relay in full — per-relay URLs, the
pattern form, {relay}, {relay-1} and {value} with what each one sends — relay
automatic control with a four-relay antenna-switch example, and the bench power
supply including why OpsLog writes only its output.
Rotators: the two new native types (SPID with the Rot1Prog/Rot2Prog choice,
DCU-1), two-rotor setups, and that Test only reads the heading on the types
where it does.
Awards: the US county database, and the difference between the automatic fill
(blanks only) and the right-click re-derive (replaces) — with the Connecticut
planning regions, which is the case that needs it.
QSL Management: QSL_VIA against QSL_SENT_VIA/QSL_RCVD_VIA, why an import shows E
on every Log4OM record, and that V counts as confirmed.
Troubleshooting: the three field reports of the last few days, by symptom.
Every [[link]] checked to resolve.
Asked whether the faster poll applies to all the rotator backends. It does —
GetRotatorHeading is one binding over PstRotator, Rotator Genius, GS-232/ARCO,
DCU-1 and SPID alike, and it reads only the ACTIVE rotor, so two towers do not
double it. But counting what that costs turned up two things worth fixing.
Every backend builds a fresh client per call — spid.New, gs232.NewSerial,
dcu1.NewSerial, rotgenius.New — so one poll is one OPEN and CLOSE of a serial
port or a TCP connection, not a read on a link already up. And the status bar
and the Station Control compass each ran their own interval against that same
binding, so with the tab open the controller was asked twice over. At the 700 ms
I had just set, that was nearly three port opens a second on a 600-baud line.
Both now share one loop, and it adapts: 500 ms while the position is changing,
3 s once it has been still for six seconds. These controllers do not report
"moving" — a SPID answers a position and nothing else — so it is inferred from
the position itself, and held briefly after the last change so the tail of a
movement stays smooth. Commanding a move, a stop, or switching rotor polls at
once, so the needle starts sweeping on the click.
A slow controller cannot stack requests behind itself either: at 600 baud a SPID
reply takes a fifth of a second on the wire alone, and a port still open from
the last poll cannot be opened again.
Field report from a tower: on a RAK/RAU in Rot1Prog, every commanded heading
made the antenna want to turn nearly a full circle ANTICLOCKWISE — 0°, 90°, any
of them — while the heading readout, the stop button and everything else worked.
BuildSet framed the four-digit Rot2Prog azimuth for both dialects. A Rot1Prog
reads three: its replies are three digits in a five-byte frame, and its command
field matches. So 90° went out as "0450" and was read as 045 — 45 − 360 = −315°.
Every target landed 360° low, which is why it was always anticlockwise and
always nearly a full turn. The operator's own guess, that OpsLog was in 720°
mode, was the right instinct in the wrong place: the fault is a decimal shift,
not a range.
The round-trip test added here is the one that would have caught it without a
tower — every degree of the circle through the command builder and back through
the reply parser, which must return the degree that went in. The frame tests
pinned the Rot2Prog form against the reference and said nothing about the other
dialect.
Two more from the same report. A rotator test that only READS the heading — SPID,
ARCO, DCU-1 — said "Packet sent, the antenna should swing to north, check
PstRotator's UDP listener", naming a program not in the path for a move never
commanded; it now says the controller answered and nothing was moved. And the
compass polled every three seconds, so a turning antenna moved the needle in
steps of about thirteen degrees; the heading now has its own 700 ms tick while
the relay boards and the antenna controller stay at three seconds.
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.
Reported as JTDX "Fake It" causing CAT disconnections. Fake It is not the
cause — it is what made an existing loop fire, and a regression of mine from
this morning is what closed that loop.
The station has an inbound remote-call row and an outbound N1MM RadioInfo row
on the same port, 2241, so every RadioInfo datagram OpsLog sends arrives
straight back on the loopback. The remote-call parser strips XML tags and takes
the last token as the callsign: for a RadioInfo that is
<ActiveRadioNr>1</ActiveRadioNr>, i.e. "1" — and <Freq> became a tune request
for the frequency the rig was already on.
That was harmless only while <Freq> was misread. It is in tens of Hz, the parser
assumed MHz, every echoed tune failed "out of the 11-digit CAT range", and the
loop died on the error. Teaching it the unit (331db58) closed the loop.
Fake It shifts the dial for each over rather than using split, so every
transmission changed the state twice — and each change published a RadioInfo,
which came back as a set, which changed the state again. The log shows the dial
oscillating 24915000/24915500 three times in 200 ms, then "timeout answering
IF;" and the shared link down. Every over, all morning.
Two guards, because one was not enough to be sure: a RadioInfo payload is never
a remote-call request, and a callsign has a letter in it — so the next program
to broadcast its state on that port cannot drive the rig either. Reload also
names an inbound and an outbound row sharing a port, which is the arrangement
that permitted this and which no settings panel shows.
Relay automatic control and the band-change outbound rows both hang off the rig
state, which is right when there IS a rig: changing Band in the entry strip
pushes a QSY, the new state comes back through the CAT callback, and the relays
follow from there — which is why this works for anyone with rig control.
Without a CAT connection nothing is pushed and nothing comes back, so a station
whose rig OpsLog does not control changed band and the antenna switch sat
exactly where it was. Reported as automatic control not working; it was never
told the band had changed.
The entry selector now says so itself, but only when the CAT push did not
happen, and never when the band or frequency lock is on: a lock means the entry
is deliberately decoupled from the rig, and moving an antenna to match a contact
logged from last year is worse than doing nothing.
The frequency is passed as unknown on that path — a band selector gives a band
and nothing else, and rules written on a frequency RANGE are left alone rather
than evaluated against a made-up dial reading.
The de-duplication of "is this a new band" is now shared by both sources, so a
station that has both does not command its switch twice for one QSY.
Also: the same credit line as the QSL e-mail now closes the default recording
e-mail body, on the same terms — a default in the template, so a stored one is
untouched.
"Designed & sent by OpsLog — https://github.com/GregTroar/OpsLog/releases/latest"
now closes the default body, so a fresh install sends it without being asked.
Put in the TEMPLATE, not appended at send time. Two consequences, both of them
the point: an operator who does not want it deletes the line once and it is
gone, and one who has already written their own body never sees it appear —
a stored template is returned verbatim and the default is only the fallback.
Appending it at send would have made it unremovable, which is not a thing to do
to somebody's outgoing mail.
The link is the human release page. updateCheckURL sits next to it in update.go
and answers JSON, which is the easy mistake here — a correspondent who clicks
the credit gets a download page, and a test says so.
Reported as delayed auto-upload breaking Recent QSOs. It does not — the grid was
waiting on the upload for its news.
Nothing reloaded the list on qso:logged. The entry form calls refresh() itself
after AddQSO, so a QSO TYPED in OpsLog always appeared; a QSO logged from
anywhere else — WSJT-X or MSHV over UDP, JTAlert, NET Control, an offline replay
— reached the grid only when something else reloaded it, and the something else
was extsvc:uploaded. With auto-upload set to immediate that arrives a second
later and hides the gap completely.
Set a service to delayed and the QSO appeared one to two minutes late; set it to
upload on close and not until the next launch. So the very thing deferring an
upload exists for — correcting a contact before it goes out — was impossible,
because there was nothing on screen to correct.
The list now follows the log, on the same debounced path the upload events
already use: qso:logged fires twice per contact (insert, then award refs) and a
contest run fires it every few seconds.
The automatic pass fills a blank county only, and deliberately: a value the
operator or QRZ supplied usually beats one derived from a ZIP code. That leaves
no way at all to correct a county already stored — and the Connecticut planning
regions are exactly that case. Every CT contact logged before that correction
holds a county the state abolished in 2022, and filling blanks never reaches
one of them.
So the new entry OVERWRITES, because it is asked for by hand on a chosen set of
rows precisely because the stored value is believed wrong. Only US entities are
touched, only callsigns the database holds, and only when the answer actually
differs — so re-running it on a mixed selection is safe and the count reported
is the number of counties that really changed. Award refs are re-materialised:
the county IS the reference for CQ USA-CA and the state for WAS.
The entry appears only once the database has been downloaded, and appears
without a restart when one finishes — an action that can only ever answer "no
database" is not worth a line in a menu this long.
Reported as OpsLog defaulting QSL_SENT_VIA and QSL_RCVD_VIA to "E" on import.
It does not: recordToQSO reads the field and normalises it, so an absent, empty,
blank or unrecognised value gives an empty one. An "E" seen after an import came
from the file — Log4OM writes QSL_SENT_VIA:1>E on every record whether a card
was ever sent, which TestQSLSentViaDoesNotBecomeManager already pins.
Nothing to change, so this pins the half nothing covered: the ABSENCE case. The
opposite is an easy reach — electronic confirmation is the common case — and
defaulting to it would quietly rewrite the operator's own record of how their
cards travelled, which is the same class of fault as issue #16.
Compiles and vets clean; not executed here — this machine's Application Control
policy began blocking freshly built test binaries partway through the session.
v0.25.5 went out with its seven entries; the block is byte-identical to the
tagged one. The version constants are left alone — the release script is the one
source that bumps them, and touching them here would make its "release commit
already exists" check misfire.
v0.25.4 was already released — tag v0.25.4 at 8113557, fourteen hours ago —
carrying exactly one entry, the WinKeyer probe. Everything since (cluster empty
state and timing, the generic HTTP relay, hardware following the profile, the
SteppIR read that never returned, the DXHunter tune unit) was written into that
block and would have been announced to operators as something they already have.
The 0.25.4 block is now byte-identical to the one that shipped, and the seven
later entries are under 0.25.5.
0.25.4 is going out with eight entries. The version constants are left alone —
the release script is the one source that bumps them, and touching them here
would make its "release commit already exists" check misfire.
io.ReadFull cannot be used on a serial port, and it was.
On Windows a serial read that times out returns (0, nil) — on this transport a
timeout is not an error. io.ReadFull loops while err == nil, so a controller
that goes quiet for one poll, or answers with a truncated frame, spins it
forever. It holds ioMu throughout, and that is the whole failure the operator
sees:
- the poll goroutine never returns, so nothing is ever logged about a fault
and the cached status keeps the antenna looking connected;
- every command blocks on the same mutex, and the trace line sat AFTER the
lock, so even the attempt left no trace.
One dropped reply on a 4800-baud link therefore stopped the antenna responding
until OpsLog was restarted, with a log that showed the antenna starting, a few
status frames, and then nothing — which is exactly how it was reported.
Reads are now bounded: three seconds for an 11-byte frame that takes 23 ms on
the wire. Giving up returns an error, and the poll loop already knows what to do
with one — say so and reconnect. The command trace moved ahead of the lock, so
what the operator asked for is in the log even when the answer is not.
The SPE driver reads through a bufio.Reader, whose ErrNoProgress guard already
covers this; the ADIF parser reads a file. This was the only exposed one.
The SteppIR report was not a SteppIR fault. In the log the antenna starts,
answers every poll, and sits at 21050 kHz while the rig works 21074 — and the
status line only prints when the frame CHANGES, so a link that is alive and
parked looks identical to one that died. The one line that explained it said
"ultrabeam: follow loop stopped", which covers two quite different situations
and, at startup where nothing was running, reads as a fault. Tracking was simply
switched off. It now says which of the two it is, names the antenna type, and
states the consequence — that the antenna will not follow the rig.
Same log, a second and unrelated fault: every launch failed a tune request from
DXHunter with "frequency 2107400000000 out of the 11-digit CAT range".
<FREQ> was read as MHz, but DXHunter had echoed back the value OpsLog itself
published in the N1MM RadioInfo broadcast, whose <Freq> is in tens of Hz. Both
units come from the same peer, so the unit is now inferred: try MHz, kHz, Hz,
tens of Hz, and keep the first that lands on an amateur band — anything a
station is asked to tune to is in one. Hz before tens of Hz because their only
overlap, 40 m against 4 m, is far more likely to be 40 m. Nothing plausible
tunes nothing and says so, rather than sending the rig to a wrong band.
Every setting is per profile, amplifiers included — that is the whole point of
one profile per station. But the amplifier clients were built once at startup
and again only when Settings was saved, so switching profile left them on the
previous profile's port. An operator with an SPE on COM9 for HF and another on
COM10 for 6 m had to open Settings and press Save after every switch. Save is
not a connect button; switching profile is what asks for that hardware.
The amplifier is what was reported, but it was never alone: the motorized
antenna, the Antenna Genius and the Tuner Genius are configured the same way and
were started in the same two places. All four now restart on a profile switch,
asynchronously, exactly as a save does.
Rotators were already correct — their client is built per command rather than
held open, so they read the active profile every time.
Unconditional, like a save: comparing each device's configuration across
profiles to skip a reconnect would trade a second of downtime for the chance of
missing one. A test now keeps the two lists in lockstep — anything started at
boot must be re-applied on a profile switch or be named, with its reason, as
something that must not be.
It was built the other way round on a misreading of two screenshots: the pattern
held {value} and the per-relay boxes held numbers to drop into it. The ask was
simpler and better — {value} is the name typed in Relay labels, so a switch
addressed by antenna name is one pattern instead of eight URLs:
http://10.10.10.100/relay?on={value} relay 1 named Ant1 → ?on=Ant1
Renaming the antenna re-addresses it, and the name on the button and the name on
the wire cannot drift apart because they are the same string. It works in the
per-relay URLs and in the patterns alike, so the per-relay boxes go back to
holding URLs and nothing about them changes meaning any more.
The label is percent-encoded with %20 rather than "+" for a space: "+" is a
space only in a query string and a literal plus in a path, and this can land in
either half of a URL.
{value} on a relay with no label would send "?on=", an empty parameter that most
boards answer with a cheerful 200 and no movement. The driver refuses it and
names the label as what is missing; the editor warns while it is being typed,
beside the empty box rather than after an antenna fails to switch. The labels
also join the driver's cache key — they are part of the wire format now.
They were made session-only on a misreading: the ask was about the FIRST launch
of a fresh install, not every launch. Restored as they were — restored on
reopen, and travelling with a copied data/ folder.
A first-ever launch already starts with nothing filtered: every selection
defaults to empty or off and there is no code that switches one on. The one
route by which a new installation can come up filtered is a copied data/ folder,
which carries the previous machine's selections by design.
The filtered-out message and the clear-every-filter button stay: they are what
makes a filter that IS set visible, whenever it was set.
buildDeviceDriver had no case for "httpgen", so the generic board fell through
to the WebSwitch driver: it polled an address it had never been given, reported
itself offline, greyed out every relay button, and sent none of the configured
URLs. Nothing in the interface said so — the board was configured, saved and
listed, and simply did nothing. deviceKey did not cover the URLs either, so once
that is fixed, correcting a typo in one would still have handed back the cached
driver holding the old address until a restart.
Two shapes of home-made switch could not be described at all:
- a bit-mask board whose four URLs differ by one character
(/Set0/1, /Set0/2, /Set0/4, /Set0/8) — {value} in the pattern now takes the
number from the per-relay box, keeping the address in one place;
- a board numbering its channels from zero — {relay-1}, since giving up the
pattern for eight hand-typed URLs was the only alternative.
The pattern decides what the per-relay boxes hold, and the grid says which as
soon as {value} is typed: guessing per box ("does this look like a URL?") would
change meaning on a typo, which is not a thing to do to something wired to an
antenna. A URL typed without a scheme gets http:// like the named boards get
from relayBase; https:// is passed through untouched.
Host and the connection test are gone for this type. It has no address of its
own — its relays may each live on a different box — and no status to read, so a
test could only ever answer "OK, 4 relays". Save was greyed out without a host,
which made a complete configuration of four full URLs impossible to store.
Cluster filters no longer persist across launches. A band lock set weeks earlier
is invisible to whoever set it: the counter reads 76 spots live, the grid is
empty, and the search goes to the cluster instead. Nobody loses work by
re-ticking a chip. Grouping and the panel state still persist — they change how
spots look, never whether they appear.
An operator sent two screenshots: 76 LIVE in the counter, and the panel beside
it reading "Waiting for spots… Spots will appear as the cluster sends them."
Both his band and mode were locked to the rig — 20 m, SSB — so the filters were
doing exactly their job and the empty state was describing a different problem
entirely. He went looking for a connection fault.
It now says how many arrived, names every filter currently narrowing the list,
and offers one button to clear them all. The band and mode locks are named
first: they follow the rig rather than a click, so they are the two nobody
remembers switching on.
Also times the connection. He reports the first launch taking a while to
produce spots and a restart connecting instantly, which is the signature of a
slow name resolution rather than a slow node — the OS caches the answer, so the
second run skips it. The log now carries the dial duration and the delay to the
first spot, which separates that from a node that simply had nothing to say.
Hypothesis, not conclusion: the next log settles it.
Logger32's WinKeyer debug against the K3NG that will not answer OpsLog is a
capture of the exchange working, on the same keyer and the same port:
Sent: 13 13 13 00 04 55
Rcvd: 55 (72 ms)
Sent: 00 02 Host open
Rcvd: 23 (WK2 v23)
That is the sequence I already send. The difference is the grouping: Logger32
puts the three nulls and the echo probe in ONE write, and we split them with a
50 ms pause and a buffer purge in between. On a keyer that reboots when the
port opens, that pause is a window for it to come up mid-sequence and swallow
half of it — and there was nothing to wait for, since a null produces no reply.
The handshake bytes are now logged unconditionally, not behind the diagnostic
option. "No WinKeyer answered" cannot be told apart from a wrong port, a wrong
baud rate, a keyer still booting, or another program holding the line. The
bytes can, and it is four lines per connect attempt.
0.25.3 shipped with its two entries — the verified-confirmation fix and the
native SPID rotator — and they are two separate subjects, so there was nothing
to merge this time.
Version constants untouched: the release script owns them, and it already
bumped them to 0.25.3 in the commit before this one.
Same bug as yesterday's, one screen further on. The QSL Info table maps the
statuses it knows — Y, R, I, M — and falls through to "No" for anything else.
ADIF's V is anything else. So a contact confirmed AND validated by LoTW was
reported as not received, in the one place an operator opens to check.
V now has its own label, Verified, in the green of a confirmation, and it is in
the dropdown too. That second half matters more than it looks: a select whose
value is not among its items renders blank, so a verified contact looked like
nothing had been recorded — and the operator's next click would have replaced
the strongest confirmation they hold with whatever they picked instead.
The QSL Manager's bulk list is deliberately left alone: it sets paper QSL
status across a selection and defaults to "leave", so it never displays a
stored value, and "verified" is not something a paper card can be.
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.
An operator's screenshot had it side by side: the Awards panel showed Morocco
validated on five bands, and the band/mode matrix two inches above showed the
entity as merely worked.
ADIF's QSL_Rcvd enumeration has both Y and V — "received" and "verified" — and
V is what a LoTW download writes for a confirmation the ARRL has validated. The
award engine's isYes accepted "Y" or "V". Everything else in the app compared
against 'Y' alone: the worked-before status grid, the slot statistics, the row
colouring by QSL status, the awards QSO list, the call history badges. So the
confirmations an operator cares most about were the ones that did not count.
Now one definition per side, named so the next reader finds the other:
qso.ConfirmedValues on the Go side, used by the queries themselves, and
isQSLConfirmed in lib/qsl on the frontend, which rowColors and the panels call
instead of testing the letter.
The Go test drives the real query shape against a real database with a 'V' row
— the constant being right is not the point, the queries using it is.
0.25.2 is going out. The version constants are left alone — the release script
is the one source that bumps them, and touching them here would make its
"release commit already exists" check misfire.
Fourteen entries for ten subjects. "UDP" appeared four times and "Motorized
antenna" twice, which is one line per commit rather than one per thing an
operator notices.
The two new outbound services are now one Connections entry, everything that
was made loggable is another, and the antenna's two silences — a lost port and
a controller going its own way — read as the single symptom they produce.
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.
An operator was about to build band→relay mapping into the custom URL rows.
It already exists, and better: relay auto-control has a per-relay "band" rule
driving webswitch, KMTronic, Dingtian, Denkovi and USB boards. It holds state
so a relay is only commanded when its wanted position changed, reads the
boards live before the first apply so it does not re-command one already in
place, and carries per-relay labels. A URL fired on a band change has none of
that, and would have been a second definition of "which antenna on which band"
— the drift that cost us a week on counties.
So the gap was only the hardware: a hand-made switch is none of the five named
types. It is now the sixth, "HTTP relay": an ON URL and an OFF URL, either as
one pattern with {relay} substituted, or one pair per relay. The per-relay
form is the reason it exists — these boxes often have URLs with nothing in
common between channels (…/FF0101 and …/FF0201), which no pattern can express.
Status is remembered rather than read: most have no endpoint worth trusting.
The cost is stated in the code and the panel — after a restart every relay is
re-commanded once, which is harmless on a board with no memory and far better
than assuming an antenna is already selected.
And the Connections panel now says so, exactly where the wrong choice is made:
picking a band change with a URL transport shows a note pointing at Station
Control. The URL transport stays — a lookup pushed to a webhook or a QSO to a
dashboard is an event, not a state, and Station Control has no place for it.
Two answers to "can people debug this when it does not work".
They could not. A custom UDP row logged "sent 18 bytes to 127.0.0.1:12000"
and nothing about the message — which is a template the operator wrote, so
the byte count says nothing about whether the substitution came out as they
meant. The payload is now in the line, with the trigger that fired it, for
custom rows only: an ADIF record or a binary WSJT frame on every QSO would
bury the log rather than fill it.
Worse was the silent case. A template that is a single placeholder the trigger
does not carry — {freq} on a band change — renders empty, sends nothing, and
looked exactly like a row that had never fired. It now says so, throttled per
row, and points at the field list.
And a password in a URL is redacted before it reaches the file. Storing
http://admin:secret@switch/ as typed was a deliberate choice for LAN gear;
writing it into a log that gets sent to whoever is helping is a different
choice, and was never made.
The Settings section is "Connections" rather than "UDP integrations", since it
has not been UDP-only since the URL transport landed. The log prefix stays
"udp:" on purpose — renaming it would orphan every log an operator has already
sent and every note anyone has written against it.
The hard-coded emitters each speak one published format at one fixed moment.
This is the escape hatch, and it exists mainly for antenna switches: they are
driven by a URL, and the band change is the trigger they want.
Four triggers, each carrying its own field set: band change (the RADIO's band,
not the entry form — a switch follows the rig, not what is being typed), QSO
logged, rotator command and callsign lookup. The panel prints the fields the
selected trigger can fill, which is the point of the whole thing: a placeholder
the trigger does not carry renders as nothing, and without the list an operator
writes {freq} on a band change and has no way to learn why the switch never
moved.
Three things the panel cannot show, handled here:
- Escaping. A URL needs every value percent-encoded; a UDP payload must not
be touched. The first portable callsign, F4BPO/P, puts a path separator in
the middle of a query string otherwise — it works on the bench and fails on
the air.
- Blocking. An HTTP call to a switch that is unplugged would otherwise sit
for the operating system's timeout, on the path of a band change. It runs
in the background with a 3 s limit.
- Silence. A switch answering 404 after a firmware update fails exactly like
success looks from here, so the status code is logged, throttled per row.
The rotator trigger hooks the COMMAND rather than the SP/LP buttons, so the
compass and a spot click fire it too, and the path ("SP"/"LP") is passed
through because an azimuth alone cannot say which was taken — 137° is short
path to one station and long to another.
Credentials in a URL are stored as typed. That is the operator's call, on the
grounds that this is LAN gear, and the hint in the panel says so.
"WSJT-X logged QSO (Logger32)" reads as Logger32-only, and it is not: the row
speaks the WSJT-X UDP interface, which several loggers listen on. An operator
running something else would have scrolled past a service that would have
worked for them.
Logger32 stays in the hint as the example it is — it is what this was built
against, and its additional sockets are where most people will point it — and
port 2250 stays as the default, a starting point rather than a rule.
The ADIF datagram reached Logger32's socket and still nothing appeared in its
log. WSJT-X sends TWO messages for every contact — QSO Logged (type 5), the
structured one, and Logged ADIF (type 12) — and receivers differ on which they
read: MacLoggerDX takes the structured one by default and offers the ADIF as
an option. We were sending only the half Logger32 does not use.
Both now go out on that row, in WSJT-X's own order. Nothing double-logs: any
receiver built for WSJT-X already sees both from the real thing.
Type 5 is read positionally, so the field order is pinned by a test against
NetworkMessage.hpp — one field out of place shifts every one after it and the
receiver files nonsense without complaining. QDateTime is Qt's own encoding:
Julian day, milliseconds since midnight, then the time spec, which is sent as
UTC (1) because a spec of 0 would have the receiver re-read the contact in its
own zone. The Julian arithmetic is checked against known values; a day out
there files every QSO on the wrong date.
"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.
Two silences from one operator's log.
The SteppIR is not blocked — it is being overruled. Every tune is commanded,
acknowledged on the next poll with the frequency asked for, then replaced on
the poll after by a different one: 21075 asked, 21075 confirmed, 21050
reported, again and again, with the operator tuning once more each time. Two
minutes of that reads as a dead link. It now says what it is, once, when the
motors have stopped and the reported frequency is more than 10 kHz from the
commanded one — a controller quantising to its own grid is not a fault, one
sitting somewhere else entirely is.
UDP outbound had no positive signal at all: only failures were logged. When
an operator sets up an ADIF message to a second logger and nothing arrives,
"OpsLog never sent it" and "the other program did not take it" looked exactly
the same from here — and the first is the common case, because a row created
as an inbound ADIF listener instead of an outbound ADIF message matches
nothing and emits nothing. Successful sends are logged with their destination
and service, and a QSO logged with no outbound row says so once a session.
The paper form had one "Via", which since the QSL_VIA split writes
QSL_SENT_VIA. QSL_RCVD_VIA had no way in at all outside the per-QSO editor —
a field with a column, an import and an export, and nothing to fill it.
Each direction now has its own route dropdown, sitting with the status and
date it belongs to: how the card was sent, beside Sent; how it came back,
beside Received. Both apply to the whole selection, which is the shape of the
job — a stack confirmed in one go usually arrived the same way, a bureau
delivery being exactly that, and doing it one QSO at a time in the editor was
the only option before.
Both store the ADIF enumeration (B/D/E), and neither touches QSL_VIA — that
holds the manager's callsign and belongs to the QSO, not to a stack of cards
being confirmed together.
The two columns were already available in the paper list: it renders through
RecentQSOsGrid, which gained them with the field itself.
Two problems from one operator's log, both of them the log's fault.
SteppIR. The last line about it is "status query failed, reconnecting: Port
has been closed" and then nothing — for the rest of the session. The poll loop
does retry every two seconds, but a failed open was a bare `continue`: no line,
ever. And startUltrabeam had three silent ways out — settings unreadable, the
antenna turned off, no port or host configured — so a cleared field and a lost
adapter produced exactly the same evidence, which is none. Both now say what
happened, with the port or host named. Reopen failures are reported three
times and then throttled (a port that is gone stays gone), and the recovery
says how many attempts it took.
FLDIGI. Four hundred "ADIF payload ignored" lines and nothing else legible.
The cause is in the same log: two inbound listeners on the SAME multicast
group and port, 239.255.0.1:2237 — one WSJT (MSHV), one ADIF (FLDIGI). Every
WSJT-X packet is delivered to both, and an FT8 cycle is dozens of decodes
every fifteen seconds; the bursts in the log are exactly 15 s apart. The ADIF
listener now checks for the WSJT-X magic and says so once, with what to do
about it, instead of rejecting each packet in writing. Anything else is
described a few times with its payload and then goes quiet.
An operator waited over a minute and the button never appeared; opening
Settings and pressing Cancel made it appear at once. That is the whole
diagnosis — Cancel was the only thing that re-read the option.
GetChaseNew returned the cached atomic, which exists for the MQTT goroutine
and is false until startup has read the setting. The UI asked while the
database was still opening, was told "off", believed it, and never asked
again. It now reads the setting, like the grid-chasing binding beside it.
The frontend asks again at the two moments this class of race resolves: when
GetStartupStatus returns, and when the first logbook load succeeds — the seam
that already re-reads the connection label for exactly this reason, with a
comment saying so.
The open/closed state was already remembered per machine; it is now in
PORTABLE_KEYS with the other widget toggles, so it travels with data/ like the
rotor and amplifier panels rather than being the one that does not.
Three cuts, all of them removing things nobody could act on.
The frequency column is gone. Clicking the row tunes the rig to it, so the
number was there to be read and never used. It is still carried on the spot —
the click is what needs it — and it is in the row's tooltip. The country takes
the space.
Modes are limited to FT8, FT4, FT2, PSK31 and RTTY. WSPR is the one worth
spelling out: it is a beacon, nobody answers a WSPR transmission, so a "new
entity on WSPR" is a path report and not a station to work — and on a quiet
band it would have been most of the list.
Bands are limited to the operator's own list. PSK Reporter carries every band
its receivers listen on, and a 13 cm decode is not an opportunity for a station
with no 13 cm.
Both tests run before the status lookup and both read a cached map: they throw
away most of the feed, so nothing downstream pays for it. The band list is
re-read when the lists are saved, so ticking a band in Settings applies to the
next decode rather than the next restart — which would have looked like the
filter not working.
Four things from an operator's first look at the panel, and one of them was
mine.
The frequency column showed "—" on every row. pskr.Spot.FreqHz was declared
and documented in one edit and never assigned in the next, so the payload's
"f" was parsed and dropped. A click therefore filled the callsign and left
the rig where it was, which is half the point of the panel. Assigned, with a
test that runs a real payload through and checks the value survives into the
Spot — the field being declared is what made it look done.
A row now carries ONE indication instead of stacking them. A station can be a
new band and a new prefix at once; the row says the first that matters, in the
order that would make an operator leave what they are doing: entity, band,
mode, slot, then prefix, then square. Two badges on one line made the list
unreadable at a glance, which is the only thing it is for.
Each category has a filter chip in the header, in its own colour, remembered
across sessions. A toolbar button shows the panel and a cross closes it — the
same split the Super Check Partial panel uses, where the setting decides
whether the feature exists and the button whether it is on screen.
The panel is wider and the country column gets what is left, which is more
than it was now that a row carries one badge.
An operator's keyer dropdown showed COM1 and COM3 twice, in the order
COM1 COM1 COM3 COM8 COM9 COM4 COM3, with "COM3COM3" as the selected value —
two entries sharing one value both counted as selected.
Not our bug to start with, but ours to absorb. Windows enumerates serial
ports from HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM, which maps a DEVICE PATH to a COM
name, so the same name legitimately appears twice when two devices claim it:
a driver uninstalled without cleaning up after itself, or virtual-port
software. go.bug.st/serial returns one entry per device, faithfully.
Deduplicated and naturally sorted in the one binding every port dropdown in
the app calls, so CAT, rotators, amplifiers and the keyer all get it. COM4
now sits between COM3 and COM8 rather than after COM9, which is how a port
gets overlooked on a machine with a dozen.
A dropped duplicate is logged rather than swallowed: two devices holding one
COM name is also a good reason for one of them to report that port busy, and
that is not something an operator can work out from a list.
PSK Reporter tells you what is actually being decoded in your region, which
is a larger set than what somebody chose to spot: nobody spots the FT8 caller
running ten watts from a rare square.
Almost all of it existed. The MQTT payload already carries frequency, mode,
transmitter and both grids; the watcher already drops any report collected
further than NearKm from the operator, which is exactly the question worth
asking — the station is being heard HERE, not in Japan; and with grid chasing
on the subscription is already every band, filtered at the broker by receiver
square, measured at 0.2 to 1.2 messages a second. This reads messages that
were arriving and being discarded.
"New" is not decided here. Every spot goes through ClusterSpotStatuses, the
same function the DX cluster grid uses and the same cached index, so the two
panels cannot drift apart the way the county columns did. Cost per message is
map lookups behind an option cached in an atomic, because the MQTT goroutine
must never wait on the settings store.
The option is its own, not nested under grid chasing: chasing squares and
chasing entities are different wants, and the feed now has three consumers,
any one of which brings it up and none of which cuts the others loose when it
goes down.
The panel says "digital modes only" in its footer. An empty list has to mean
"nothing new on FT8/FT4/JS8 near you", not "the band is dead" — it will never
show a new entity on CW.
The comment came out "SSB WAC EU WAZ 15 WPX HA5" — the QSO's materialised
award_refs hold both kinds, and I took them all. Those four are what every
reader of the spot derives from the callsign in their head. They spent the
whole 30-character comment saying nothing and buried SOTA HA/KM-018, the one
reference anyone would have acted on.
Computed awards are now filtered out with the same rule the QSO editor uses
(isComputedAwardField), which is why they are the ones it lists on the left
and not in its read-only panel. The field map moves from a ref to state as
well: a ref left the first spot of a session computing before GetAwardDefs
had answered.
Also opens 0.25.2, since 0.25.1 shipped before the spot work, and sets the
default mode list to SSB, CW, FT8, FT4, FT2, RTTY, PSK31, FM. AM and
DIGITALVOICE stay in the catalogue but are no longer selected on a fresh
install. FT2 joins the digital family everywhere its siblings are listed —
report list, RST defaults, Flex power class — so it gets dB reports rather
than the 59 an unknown mode falls back to.
After the mode, which is the order a cluster line is read in:
"CW POTA FR-11553".
Two sources, because the QSO can be at either stage. While it is being typed
the entry panel holds the references as "CODE@REF;CODE@REF"; once logged they
live on the row as the materialised award_refs. The Send Spot window takes the
entry's when there are any and falls back to the last logged QSO — the same
fallback the callsign and frequency defaults already use — and picking a QSO
from the Latest list fills in that QSO's own.
A self-spot is the opposite case and gets its own builder: it announces OUR
station, so it carries MY_POTA_REF and friends. Using the QSO's award
references there would spot us with the park number of the station we just
worked, announcing us from somewhere we are not.
Both cap at the 30 characters a cluster node keeps, and add a reference whole
or not at all — a truncated park number is worse than none, since nobody can
act on it, and it still costs everyone who reads the spot. Only the comment we
BUILD is held to that; what the operator types is their own business.
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.
Fifteen entries for seven subjects — the block had "WinKeyer:" twice, "QSL:"
and "QSL designer:" four times between them, "US counties:" three times.
That is one line per commit, which is how it was written, not one line per
thing an operator notices. Merged, in both languages.
An operator's log showed the whole fault in its first line: "connected on
COM3 — no reply — the keyer did not answer Host Open", followed by seven
configuration commands and two calls sent as Morse. Nothing was listening.
Reporting a link as up and then writing to it regardless is the part worth
fixing; the handshake is why it was down.
K1EL's Application Interface Guide gives the sequence, and we did one step
of it. Now all of it:
- DTR on, RTS OFF. K1EL's own init sets DTR_CONTROL_ENABLE with
RTS_CONTROL_DISABLE, and on a serial WinKeyer those lines ARE the power
supply — DTR feeds the 3.3 V regulator, RTS provides the negative rail.
go.bug.st/serial defaults both to true, so we drove RTS high on every
connect without a line of code saying so.
- 400 ms after the lines come up, for a WK1 still booting off DTR.
- Three 0x13 nulls to resync the command parser. A keyer left part-way
through a command by whoever spoke to it last would absorb Host Open as
a parameter — the everyday cause of a silent WinKeyer, and one the
operator can do nothing about from the outside.
- An echo test (0x00 0x04 0x55) before trusting the port at all. This is
the step that answers "is there a keyer here", and connecting now fails
on it, with the byte that came back when something else replied.
The whole handshake is retried once, since the first attempt's nulls are
what clear a confused parser. Tested against a fake port that reproduces
each failure: absent, mid-command, and echoing but versionless.
copyDirContents wrote into a destination it never created, so the first
os.Create returned ENOENT. The caller was written as "ignore os.IsNotExist"
— meant for a design with no pictures at all — and that guard matched the
failed write exactly: nothing was copied, no error surfaced, and validation
two lines later reported "copied design is incomplete: hero photo file
img_… not found" with no way to tell why.
Three fixes, one cause:
- copyDirContents creates its destination;
- the caller stats the source folder instead of pattern-matching an error,
so a genuine copy failure is reported and rolls back both the row and
the folder;
- DuplicateProfile had the same defect in its own form — an INSERT … SELECT
that cloned the template rows and left their photos behind, giving the
new profile designs with no thumbnail and nothing to print. It now copies
row and folder together, per template, since each needs its id first.
A test reproduces the original failure: it fails with the exact ENOENT that
was being swallowed.
QSL_VIA is the manager. QSL_SENT_VIA and QSL_RCVD_VIA are the ADIF "QSL Via"
enumeration — B bureau, D direct, E electronic, M manager (import-only) —
and say how a card travelled. OpsLog had one column for all three:
- the import folded QSL_SENT_VIA into QSL_VIA whenever QSL_VIA was empty,
which is exactly a Log4OM export (it defaults QSL_SENT_VIA to E), so
OE6CLD saw "E" everywhere OpsLog shows the manager;
- QSL_RCVD_VIA was listed in adifPromoted with no column behind it, so it
was not stored, not kept among the extras, and not exported — dropped
outright on import;
- neither was ever written on export, so an import followed by an export
destroyed both;
- and OpsLog polluted the field itself: the QSL Manager panel wrote
"Bureau" / "Direct" / "Electronic", in full words, into QSL_VIA.
Two columns added (migration 0027), carried through the five places a
promoted ADIF field has to touch, with round-trip tests pinning the reported
case. The QSL panel now offers Bureau / Direct / Electronic for each
direction and stores the enumeration; the manager field is labelled as the
manager and holds only that. M is kept when a file gives it and never
written back out.
Existing logs hold a mixture of the two in one column. The repair is offered,
not performed: the count is shown once per log with a plain question, and a
"no" is remembered. It moves only where QSL_SENT_VIA is still empty, and only
values that normalise to the enumeration — a manager is a callsign and can
never be one of those six words, which a test pins against real manager calls.
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.
A second profile is usually the same operator with a different rig or a
different locator — same callsign, same cards. Having to redraw a design
because the antenna changed is work nobody should do.
The designer now lists the designs the active profile cannot see and copies a
chosen one into it. Designs it already sees — its own, and the shared ones —
are left out: they are not something to copy.
A COPY, not a move or a share. The original profile keeps its design untouched
and the duplicate is free to diverge, which it usually will: a second profile
exists because something differs, and that something often ends up on the card.
The PICTURES are copied too, and that is the part worth getting right. Stored
documents reference photos by name relative to the template's own asset folder,
so duplicating the JSON alone would point the new design at files that are not
in its folder. It is validated against its own folder afterwards, and a failure
rolls the row back rather than leaving a design whose pictures are missing.
Sharing the source's folder was the other option and a worse one: deleting
either design would then have emptied the other.
From a user's log, repeating throughout the session:
rigctld: split off failed: cat: this radio's backend cannot set split
rigctld: unimplemented command "X PKTUSB -1"
Both are answered with an error, and JTDX treats a rig-control error as fatal:
it abandoned a transmission 0.86 seconds into a 13.8-second frame.
"S 0" — split OFF. Fake It uses no split, and JTDX still sends this to be sure.
A backend that cannot SET split was refusing a request that was ALREADY
satisfied. It now succeeds when the rig is simplex, without touching the rig at
all. Arming still fails loudly: there the request is real and unmet, and a
client that believes it transmits up the band while the radio sits on the DX's
frequency is exactly what that refusal exists to prevent.
"X <mode>" — set_split_mode. Sent during ordinary setup, Fake It included,
where there is no second VFO to give a mode to. Accepted now: applied when a
split is in force, and a plain success otherwise, because the transmit VFO
already has that mode — it is the same VFO. get_split_mode answers to match.
Both regressions fail without the fix with the exact codes from that log,
RPRT -9 and RPRT -11.
Only PTT transitions were recorded. So when JTDX aborted a transmission
0.86 seconds into a 13.8-second frame, the log showed the abort and the Fake It
frequency restore around it — and not the command that preceded them, which is
the one thing needed to tell whether OpsLog answered something the client could
not accept.
Behind the existing CAT wire-trace switch rather than a new one: this is a line
per poll and would drown an ordinary log, and an operator chasing a rig-control
fault turns that trace on already.
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.
RI1FJL/MM resolved to Franz Josef Land while the expedition was still sailing
there, telling the operator they had worked an entity they had not.
The old behaviour was deliberate — the comment read "strict DXCC says no
entity, but the log should still show the operator's country" — and that is
wrong for exactly this reason. A home country on a maritime mobile is not extra
information; it is a false claim about where the contact happened, and it is
the kind of false claim that gets a QSO submitted for an award it cannot win.
Trailing only. A LEADING "MM" is the Scotland prefix and "AM" is Spain, so
MM0ABC and AM5X keep their entities — getting that wrong would be a far larger
error than the one being fixed. /P, /M and /B are unaffected: a portable
station is still ashore.
In the cluster the column says "Maritime mobile — no DXCC" rather than going
blank, because blank is what an UNRESOLVED spot looks like and the two mean
opposite things — one is "we don't know yet", this is "there is nothing to
know". Display only: the QSO's own Country stays empty, since that field holds
a DXCC entity name and there is none.
ADIF defines CNTY as "STATE,COUNTY" — "GA,BARROW". OpsLog wrote the bare county
name, which a receiving logger cannot resolve: county names repeat across
states, and there is a Washington County in thirty of them. The award engine
here was never affected, since it reads the columns rather than the ADIF; the
damage was to every file we hand to someone else.
One writer covers everything — writeRecord — so this fixes file exports and the
LoTW, Club Log, HRDLog and QRZ uploads together. MY_CNTY gets the same
treatment.
The county alone is still written when no state is known: a bare name is worth
more than nothing, and inventing a prefix would be worse than either. A value
that already carries a comma passes through untouched, so re-exporting an
imported record cannot double the prefix.
Import is the mirror: "GA,BARROW" fills both columns, and a file carrying the
bare county — as OpsLog's own older exports do — still imports unchanged. The
state parsed out of CNTY only fills a blank STATE, never overrides it: STATE is
the dedicated field and the more specific statement.
"An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host" during DATA
reads the same whether the server refused the SIZE, hit an hourly quota, or
simply dropped the socket — and only the first is something an operator can act
on. The message now carries host:port, the encryption in use and the total
attachment size, so the size can be ruled in or out without a second attempt.
A path that does not exist is not counted: the mail library skips it, so
reporting it would describe a message that was never sent.
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.
compactH was 158px, "tuned so the compact entry strip fits in a single row".
A constant tuned against a layout stops being true the moment the layout
changes, and this one outlived a strip that had since shrunk — leaving about
70px of empty window under the fields.
The frontend now measures what it rendered and asks for that height, watched by
a ResizeObserver so a strip that wraps at a narrow width is followed too. The
topbar is added as its declared h-8 rather than measured, since it is fixed.
Bounded in the backend: a measurement of zero — a layout not yet painted —
must not collapse the window, and the call is ignored unless compact is on so
nothing can shrink the normal window. Rounded to whole pixels so a sub-pixel
reflow cannot start a resize loop.
It went under the Station Control rotator; the compass that wanted it is the
docked one beside the entry strip. Both are the same RotorCompass, so the
readout moves INTO that component: every compass in the app carries it, and no
caller draws its own.
The bezel already showed the short path as a red marker, but a marker is a
direction, not a number — and the numbers in the status bar are 10px, which is
what prompted this.
Clickable only when the caller passed onGoto, since a compass rendered without
one cannot turn anything and a button that does nothing is worse than a label.
The same pair already sits in the status bar, where it is 10px and several
operators reported not being able to read it. Repeated under the compass at a
size that can be read across a shack.
Clickable, like the ones in the status bar: a heading you can see and not act
on would be a step backwards from what is already there. Disabled and dashed
when no station is entered, rather than showing a heading to nowhere.
The same answer the Details tab already gave, moved to where the county is now
typed — a badge in a tab nobody has open while working a station is a badge
that does not do its job.
Debounced at 300 ms and keyed on state + county together: the field is typed
into as well as filled by the lookup, and the check queries the log. A county
name means nothing without its state, so both have to settle before asking.
The looked-up values now sit directly under the geography line they continue —
QTH, State, locator, then county and zones — and the free-text fields close the
block. Reading order follows what the lookup fills, rather than interleaving it
with what the operator types.
Comment and Note moving onto one line left the right column two rows shorter
than the left, and this fills it: county, both zones and the ADIF entity
number. All four are filled by the lookup and were only visible after opening a
tab — the wrong place for values an operator wants to SEE are right before
pressing Log.
County is a name, not a code ("St. Tammany Parish"), so it takes the flexible
width and the three numbers get fixed narrow boxes.
Cleared numeric fields store undefined, not 0. Zero is a real DXCC number and a
real zone, so an empty box has to stay empty rather than assert something the
operator did not type.
State stays up on the geography line beside QTH and the locator, which is how
the lookup fills them and how they are read.
stateBlock was built and then not placed in the row — the field simply did not
exist on screen. Now between QTH and the locator, where it was meant to go.
Left column 210 → 230px, and Comment and Note move onto ONE line side by side:
two fields that are usually a few words each were taking two full rows of the
entry strip. That frees a row for whatever goes there next.
Name, Band, Mode and Country go from 300px to 210px, which moves QTH, Comment
and Note left by the same amount. The width is set in TWO places — the Name row
and the Band/Mode/Country stack below it — and they have to stay equal or the
two rows stop lining up, so both were changed together.
State goes between QTH and the locator: it is part of the same "where is this
station" reading, and it is what WAS and the US county work key off. Narrow,
since it holds two or three characters, and upper-cased on the way in like the
other coded fields.
The Name label in this layout was hardcoded English while its twin went through
t(); fixed while here.
A log greets an operator; it does not address an envelope. "Robert Smith"
filled the Name field with something no one would ever send on the air, and it
is the first name that gets used when the contact is answered.
So fname alone, with the surname kept only as a last resort for a record that
has no first name at all — better a surname than an empty field. The nickname
option now falls back to the first name too, which is what it should have done
from the start.
joinName went with it: nothing composed a name any more.
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.
Reported on BH2SWB and 4X9AA: both flagged NEW PFX, neither ever worked, both
vanished the moment "hide worked" went on.
The predicate hid a spot when worked_call OR status === 'worked' — and that
second one is the ENTITY's status, not the callsign's. So any spot in an entity
worked years ago disappeared, however new it was for something else.
The extra markers are orthogonal to the entity status; the band map already
says so in as many words. They now win: a new prefix, county, grid or park is
never hidden, whatever the entity says. A worked entity that is new for nothing
is still hidden, which is what the filter is for.
Extracted to spotIsWorked in lib/spotDisplay, beside the other rule the cluster
and band map share, rather than left inline in a predicate that has already
grown once.
This repo has no frontend test runner, so this is verified by build and reading
rather than by a test.
Replaces the four fixed rules with the model Logger32 uses and the operator
asked for: Worked / Confirmed / QSL sent / To be sent, and inside each, which
channels count — paper QSL, LoTW, eQSL, QRZ.com. No ticks means every channel,
because a rule the operator has not narrowed must not quietly become a rule
about nothing.
"To be sent" is FIRST in the order, and that is the substantive decision here.
A contact can be confirmed on LoTW and still owe a paper card; the colour an
operator scans for is the one meaning "something is still owed". Placed after
"confirmed" that row goes green and the card never gets printed.
"Worked" is the catch-all — nothing sent, nothing requested, nothing back — and
is off by default, since turning it on paints every remaining row.
R and Q both count as owed: ADIF says requested and queued, and both mean the
card has not gone out.
"The ON button does nothing" has three different causes — the modem-line pulse
was refused, the pulse went out and the amplifier ignored it, or the amplifier
woke and the UI missed it — and the log could not separate them: it recorded
one combined error and never said whether the amp came up.
RTS and DTR are now reported separately (not every USB-serial chip honours the
modem lines, and some refuse them without saying so), alongside the model and
transport. A watcher then logs whether the amplifier answered within 15
seconds, off the caller's goroutine so the click still returns at once.
No change to the wake sequence itself, which is the part that took a long time
to get right on the 1.3K-FA.
"Was the grid in what WSJT-X sent, or did OpsLog put it there?" is the first
question asked when a contact is logged in the wrong square, and a byte count
cannot answer it. An expedition logged at its licence holder's home QTH stayed
undiagnosable for exactly that reason.
One line per QSO, around 280 bytes, whitespace collapsed so the record sits on
a single line.
Grid: RI0FA transmitted QN35 all evening and was logged with its licence
holder's home square. WSJT-X's logged ADIF usually carries no GRIDSQUARE, so
the lookup was the only source left — and QRZ/HamQTH describe where an operator
LIVES, which for an expedition is the wrong side of the planet.
The square heard on the air is now applied before the lookup runs, so
refineGrid has something to defend. It still upgrades a 4-character square to a
6-character one from the same field, and still refuses a finer square from a
different field.
SPE: decodeCSV marks the client connected on every frame it parses, and the
poll goroutine can be mid-read while PowerOff runs. The frame from a second ago
landed after PowerOff had marked the amp offline and put it straight back,
which is why OFF had to be pressed twice.
Frames are ignored for three seconds after the off key goes out — the window is
opened before the key is sent, so nothing already travelling can beat it. Time
bounded rather than latched: an amp switched back on at its own front panel has
to reappear without being told.
Reported: ten fresh contacts upload and appear on LoTW; twenty older ones,
bulk-edited to exactly the same LOTW_SENT/RCVD state, are accepted by OpsLog
and never arrive. The operator's reading was that a failed attempt could not be
overridden. It is simpler and worse than that.
TQSL's exit codes, from its own cmdline documentation:
8 NO QSOs were processed — already uploaded OR OUT OF DATE RANGE
9 some processed, some ignored — same two reasons
14 some already uploaded, the rest signed
8 and 9 were both read as plain success. So on 8 — nothing uploaded at all —
OpsLog announced "already uploaded (duplicate)" and stamped every selected
contact as sent. They were never on LoTW and now looked as if they were, which
is exactly the reported symptom, and it is not recoverable by re-uploading
because the operator has no reason to try.
"Out of date range" is the cause that bites here: a contact older than the
callsign certificate's validity is silently left out. Older QSOs failing while
today's succeed is the signature.
Now: 8 is a failure and nothing is stamped — a duplicate left at "R" is
harmless and will be refused again, whereas a contact wrongly marked sent is
one nobody will look at twice. 9 and 14 succeed but carry Ignored, and the
caller says so in the console and a toast.
TQSL's own sentence ("20 QSO records are out of date range") is captured and
shown. It was being read and thrown away, and it is the whole answer to "why is
my contact not on LoTW".
Two BandMap instances, and cleaning up a duplicated attribute took the prop off
the docked one as well as the copy. The multi-band tab drew the badge; the map
beside the entry form — the one actually in front of the operator — did not.
Logger32 draws a green square for a LoTW user and an X for a worked one. The
square is the part worth copying; the way it is drawn is not.
Colour on this map is already spoken for — it carries the entity status, and
the left edge of each pill stacks the new-park / new-county markers. Adding a
green fill for LoTW would put two unrelated meanings on one channel, and an
operator would have to work out which green meant what. So it is the same "L"
badge the cluster list draws, in the same muted blue, for the reason written
there: whether a station uploads to LoTW says nothing about whether the spot is
worth chasing.
Worked stations already read as worked here — the pill goes grey and the
status markers speak — so no X is needed.
Switchable in Settings → Appearance, and on by default: a `configured` flag
distinguishes "saved with this off" from "saved before the option existed", so
turning it off sticks instead of being undone by the next default.
The band map received the raw spot stream filtered by band alone, so none of
the cluster's filters reached it: switching on "LoTW users only" changed the
list and left the panadapter showing everyone. The same was true of hide
worked, the spotter continent, and the status and mode chips.
The predicate is extracted and shared rather than copied — two views of one
spot stream disagreeing about the same spot is the fault lib/spotDisplay
already exists to prevent, and a second copy would have drifted the first time
a filter was added.
The BAND filter is deliberately excluded from the shared part: a band map's
band is its filter, and applying the cluster's would empty every map but one.
The first version filled the whole row at 24%, and in a real log that meant
every row was painted: nearly every contact has SOME QSL state, so colour was
present everywhere and stopped being information — a striped background with
the data behind it.
The default is now a 3px stripe down the left edge. Same signal, nothing lost
to read it. A filled row is still offered, with a strength slider, for
operators who want the block — and the rule cards in Settings preview whichever
is chosen, so the decision is made by looking rather than by imagining.
Drawn as an inset shadow rather than a border: a border would shift the cells
three pixels on coloured rows only, and the columns would stop lining up.
Style and strength are normalised rather than rejected — a value out of range
is a slider that got away, not a reason to reset the operator's colours.
The "to send" rule only looked at qsl_sent, so a contact waiting to go to LoTW
— marked R, and the commonest not-gone-out-yet state in a digital log — matched
nothing and stayed uncoloured. It now covers any route still queued, and the
label says so.
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.
OrderedIDs scanned qso_date straight into a time.Time. The column holds a
formatted STRING — the repo writes it with Format(isoMillis) and reads it back
through parseTimeLoose everywhere else — so the scan failed on every call, the
index was never built, and omitempty then dropped the zero from the JSON. A
column that shipped blank.
Scans the string and parses only the newest row; the ordering already came from
SQL, so 30 000 parses were never needed.
Tested against a real SQLite file with the date stored exactly as the repo
writes it, and with the ids running opposite to the dates — the imported-ADIF
case that is the whole reason this is not the id. It fails without the fix with
the scan error itself.
Not the id: the primary key follows insertion order, so importing an old ADIF
gives the oldest contacts the highest ids. This is a rank over qso_date.
Computed over the WHOLE log, not the query result — ranking inside the result
would renumber every contact the moment a filter is applied, and QSO #1 would
change identity as the operator typed.
Held as one id-to-rank map, built from a single ordered id query and dropped
with the other derived indexes when the log changes. A contact logged from the
entry form is the newest, so it takes the next number without rereading the
log: AddQSO deliberately avoids full invalidation because a contest run would
pay for it once per QSO. A contact entered with an OLDER date belongs in the
middle of the order, so there the map is dropped and rebuilt rather than
mis-numbered.
A batch that never reaches the disk looks exactly like one that does: the
locators are in memory either way until the next restart, which is the one
moment the difference shows. The shutdown flush was the least observable of
all — it runs last, and nothing said whether it had written anything.
Audit of every field a lookup returns against what OpsLog can store, prompted
by a report that HamQTH was not fetching the email.
The email was never broken: pinned now against a captured HamQTH answer, it
parses and reaches the QSO. The reported callsign simply has no public address
on HamQTH, which the empty field could not distinguish from a fault — so the
"[email protected]" placeholder is gone. A greyed-out sample address in the one
field an operator checks to see whether the lookup found one reads as a value.
Real gaps found and closed:
- web: the qso table has had the column since migration 0003 and no provider
mapping ever read it. HamQTH sends <web>.
- picture: Result.ImageURL was documented "QRZ only" because HamQTH's element
is <picture>, not <image>. It was there all along.
- zip: sent by both providers, read by neither.
- adr_name: used only as a fallback when a record carries neither nick nor
name. Deliberately NOT preferred over <nick> — a log wants the name the
operator goes by on the air, "Igor", not "Igor Vladimirovich Getman".
The parse tests use a real captured payload, including the stray <div> advert
the server injects into its own XML.
The chips in Settings only ever shaped the PSK Reporter SUBSCRIPTION. Neither
feed path checked them: both asked bandopen.Watched, which says which bands the
detector is capable of and knows nothing about the selection. So the cluster
path announced every watched band regardless, and widening the subscription to
"+" for grid chasing let PSK Reporter do the same — a station with only 6 m
ticked got 10 m and 2 m badges.
The selection is now cached beside the on/off flag and checked on both paths,
and unticking a band puts its badge out: badges fade on a timer fed by spots
the detector no longer looks at, so it would otherwise stay lit until a
restart.
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 cache dropped EVERY entry once it passed 20 000. That was survivable while
the only feed was this station's own WSJT-X decodes, which never reached the
ceiling — it is a cliff for anything larger, and every locator in the cluster
list would disappear at once, periodically, for no reason the operator could
see.
Two generations: when the current map fills it becomes the previous one and a
fresh map takes over; lookups consult both. A rotation therefore costs the
older half and nothing more. It needs no insertion order, no per-entry
timestamp and no bookkeeping on the write path — all of which "evict the
oldest thousand" would require, on a path that runs once per decode.
The cap is 100 000, measured at 82 bytes an entry: 8 MB a generation, 16 MB
for both. 20 000 was chosen when the ceiling was unreachable anyway.
Both maps now go through rememberDecodeGrid / lookupDecodeGrid. Rotation swaps
the map headers, so the read had to be guarded; routing every access through
one accessor is what makes that checkable rather than remembered.
Entries had grown to 250-450 characters, carrying the symptom, the mechanism
and the reassurance about existing setups. The panel is read top to bottom;
that belongs in the commit message, which has no length limit and is not
competing for the reader's attention.
"Watch for band openings" only ever governed the extra DATA SOURCES — the RBN
nodes and the PSK Reporter feed. The detector itself ran on every ordinary
cluster spot regardless, so an operator who had never enabled the watch still
got 10 m and 6 m opening banners from a feature he had deliberately left off.
The flag is cached on bandOpenState rather than read per spot: this is the
cluster hot path, where a settings query per spot is exactly what the rest of
this file avoids. startBandOpenFeed owns it, and it already runs at startup and
on every save, so the switch takes effect without a restart.
Switching it off also clears the live badges and the accumulated spot window.
The badges only fade on a timer fed by spots the detector no longer looks at,
so they would otherwise hang there until the next restart; and dropping the
window means switching back on starts from what is on the air rather than from
an hour-old burst. The remembered openings are kept — those really happened.
Hidden from the filter panel and forced off, without touching the machinery
behind them — it is correct and took several rounds to get right, so it stays
whole.
One flag in lib/spotDisplay does both jobs: readSpotDisplayOptions answers
false while it is down, which covers the band map, and App.tsx seeds its two
states from that same call instead of reading localStorage directly. Without
that second half an operator who already had "No colour on worked" saved would
have kept it applied with no switch left to turn it off.
The saved preferences are deliberately left in localStorage rather than
cleared, so whoever had either option on gets their choice back the day the
switches return instead of silently starting from off.
Two dates side by side put each one in a half-width Field2, which spends 120px
on its label column — the second label overlapped the first input and the row
ran off the panel. The comment ten lines above says exactly this about the
group/subgroup fields; one per row, as everything else in this editor.
Also shows a far-future end date as open-ended. RDA carries 9999-12-31 as "no
end" and printing it back reads like a real deadline.
The claim that an empty per-reference window inherits the award's is now a
test rather than a comment: a QSO before the award's own ValidFrom does not
count for a reference that has no window of its own, and a narrower reference
window still applies on top.
References are not forever: a park is delisted, a district merged, a castle
loses its number. A QSO made while the reference existed is a valid contact
and must keep counting; one made afterwards must not.
The JSON format did not need to change — ValidFrom/ValidTo were already on
awardref.Ref, already columns in award_references, already round-tripping
through export and import. They were simply never read: awardRefMetas dropped
them on the way into the engine, so nothing downstream could enforce them.
This carries them through and checks them in keepRefs.
Empty means the award's own window governs, which inScope already enforces for
every QSO in the award. That fallback is deliberately NOT duplicated per
reference — two places enforcing the same dates is two places for them to
disagree. The editor shows the award's dates as the hint under the boxes so
the operator can see what empty inherits.
Dates are compared as ISO strings rather than parsed times: the stored shape
is "2006-01-02", lexical order on it IS chronological, and this cannot fail on
a malformed value the way a parse can — a reference with a typo in its window
keeps counting instead of silently vanishing from an operator's totals.
The Explain trace names the date and the cutoff, because "did not count" on a
contact the operator remembers making is exactly when they need to be told it
is the reference that has a window, not their log that is wrong.
Only the whole-catalogue bundle was reachable from the UI, so sharing one
award meant handing over every award you have — including the ones you edited
for yourself.
Nothing new was needed underneath: ExportAward(code) already existed and
already reads the definition AND its references from the database rather than
from the embedded catalog, which is the point (a WAPC is only worth sharing
because of the province list and city regexes the operator added). The English
and French strings existed too. Only the button was missing.
Kept distinct from the catalog publish next to it: that one stamps a version
and clears user_edited to seed a release, this one is a plain share and leaves
both alone, so the recipient's copy is correctly marked as someone else's work
instead of a pristine built-in that future catalog updates would overwrite.
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 card is two grid columns wide and sits beside a tall neighbour in Station
Control, so a single row of four bars left the height unused and squeezed each
bar into a quarter of the width. Two rows of two fill the room already there
and double the resolution of every bar.
The PowerGenius XL card gated its whole meter row on flex.amp_available, so
on any station without a FlexRadio it rendered OPERATE and the fan selector
over an otherwise empty two-column card — reported from a TS-590 station.
Nothing was missing from the backend. internal/powergenius already parses
forward power, drain current, VSWR and temperature out of the GSCP status
frame, and the docked AmpWidget already prefers the radio's meter stream and
falls back to those. Only the full card never learnt the fallback.
Same source preference as the widget, and the same two exclusions: peakfwd
and peakid are latched maxima that are never reset and survive in the
last-known status after the amp disconnects, so the plain readings are used
and gated on the transmit state instead of freezing on the last over.
WSJT-X "Fake It" shifts the dial for the duration of each over and puts it
back afterwards, but the restore is conditional: it reads the frequency back
and only moves the dial if it disagrees with where it believes the radio
should be.
That read lands inside the window where this backend stops polling on
purpose. A Kenwood answers "?;" to IF; while it is transmitting, and treating
that as a fault used to drop the shared CAT link entirely, so the cached
state answers instead. SetFrequency wrote the command to the rig without
touching that cache — so mid-over the cache still described the pre-over
dial, WSJT-X read its own receive frequency back, concluded there was nothing
to restore, and the radio stayed on the transmit frequency. Every later over
started from there.
Reported from a session where the dial stuck at 7075500 after a full FT8
over while a bare TUNE, which never sets a frequency, worked fine.
Only simplex updates the cache. Under split, FreqHz is the transmit frequency
while the write lands on whichever VFO the operator is on, and guessing which
side moved would put a wrong number in front of the operator — a stale one
survives until the next poll.
The test reproduces the reported sequence and fails without the fix with the
same frequency the log shows.
A 2 m opening was announced at 9650 km towards Japan. The callsigns gave it
away — 7M4RRM, JA7RPC, JF1AWC — all working EME, which is routine on 2 m and
reported to PSK Reporter like anything else. Real contacts, real grids, and no
evidence whatsoever about the band: an operator turning a beam on that bearing
would hear nothing.
Removing the flat 2400 km ceiling was right; it threw away genuine multi-hop Es
on 6 m. "No limit anywhere" was the overcorrection. The limit is per band now,
and it is physics rather than a threshold: 2 m reaches a few thousand kilometres
by tropospheric duct or a chain of Es clouds and no further, so 3500 km, and
4 m 4000. Six and ten metres keep no ceiling — multi-hop Es and F2 genuinely do
go round the world, which is the case that started all this.
Pinned from both sides: the 9650 km Japanese burst produces nothing, and a
2000 km 2 m burst in one sector still counts.
The UDP path applies the station profile, the DXCC number, the Club Log
exceptions, the zone refinement and the QSL defaults — and its comment says
"same as the manual AddQSO path", which it was not. applySolar and fillDistance
were never called there.
For an operator running digital, and that is most of the traffic on most
stations, it meant SFI, A, K and distance were empty across the whole log while
a hand-logged contact carried all four. It also quietly undermines the
history-based propagation work, which needs those numbers to be there.
applySolar now refuses a QSO more than a day old, whichever path it arrives by.
The UDP feed and the ADIF monitor normally carry contacts seconds old but
neither promises it — a logger re-broadcasting its backlog, or an operator
typing last month's contact by hand, would be handed this morning's SFI as
though it had been measured at the time. A wrong reading is worse than a missing
one: afterwards nothing tells it apart from a real one.
Width should follow use, and these two are nowhere near equal: a manager's
callsign is typed constantly, a QSL message almost never. The message held 7
columns of 12 for text most operators never write, while the field beside it —
often a long "via" instruction — was the one running out of room.
Swapped, so QSL via takes 7 and the message 5. Also puts them in the order they
are reached for.
QRZ has no record under M0BFS/QRP, so the lookup falls back to the home call —
that part worked. What followed did not: the home record's location is then
discarded, on the reasoning that a portable operator is not at their registered
address. True for /P and /M, and simply wrong for /QRP, which says something
about the transmitter and nothing about where it is.
So the grid came back empty for M0BFS/QRP while the same call without the suffix
answered perfectly, which is exactly how it was reported.
The distinction is now explicit rather than lumped in with the other operational
suffixes. /P and /M keep clearing the location, because mobile and portable both
mean somewhere other than home — that behaviour was correct and is untouched.
A power suffix stacked on a portable one (F4BPO/P/QRP) still clears: one of them
moved the operator.
A NULL never equals '', so a condition written that way returned zero rows. The
question is perfectly clear — the operator wants the ones with nothing in that
field — and answering it with silence makes the filter look broken rather than
mis-stated. eq and ne with a blank value now run the empty / not-empty test.
Empty on a NUMERIC column also had a real fault behind it. IFNULL(col,'')=''
compares 0 against '', which SQLite calls false and MySQL calls true — one
expression quietly answering two different questions depending on where the
logbook lives. Numeric columns test NULL or zero explicitly now; text keeps the
string test, where '' is a real value and 0 is not.
The dialog walked a hand-written GROUPS array. "The contact" was added to the
fields and not to it, so mode, submode and RST existed, passed every check I had
written, and could not be picked — the same shape of fault as the missing column
mapping, one layer further out. Two lists that must agree, with nothing making
them agree.
GROUPS is derived from the fields now, in declaration order, so adding a group
is adding a field. A group with no translation falls back to its own name rather
than rendering an empty heading: a missing label should look untidy, not
invisible.
Also stacks the DX sunrise/sunset in the band-slot header. Side by side it cost
about 150 px of a row that also carries the callsign, the badges and the band
grid, and it was what pushed that row onto a second line. Two short times one
above the other cost a fraction of it and no extra height — the row is already
taller than one line of text. The "UTC" label goes to the tooltip: the times are
monospaced and always UTC everywhere in OpsLog, so it was spending width to
repeat a convention the operator already lives by.
A bulk-editable field passes through THREE tables: the list the dialog shows,
bulkFieldColumns in app.go, and bulkEditableCols in internal/qso. I added mode,
submode and RST to the first and the third and missed the middle one, so the
dialog offered them and every save came back "unknown field".
Nothing warns about that. Each table is perfectly valid on its own, and the
mismatch only surfaces when an operator picks the one field that falls through
the gap — which is exactly how it was found.
So both directions are pinned now: every mapped field must be writable by the
qso layer, and every writable column must have a field mapping to it. A column
nothing maps to looks supported from the inside and cannot be reached from
outside, which is the same fault wearing the other hat.
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.
Every one of the 2660 references was filed under European Russia. Corrected
against the RDA reference list: 991 are Asiatic Russia (15), and the 24 KA-
districts are Kaliningrad (126), which is not Russia for DXCC purposes at all.
1645 were already right.
dxcc_filter went from [15,54] to [15,54,126] with them. That filter decides
which QSOs are even considered, so leaving it alone would have made the 24
Kaliningrad districts unclaimable — a correction that quietly removes references
is worse than the error it fixes.
BA-27 (Mezhgorye) and BO-33 (Schebekino) are not in the reference list at all
and were left exactly as they were. Guessing an entity for a district nobody
lists is how a second wrong answer gets added to the first.
Only the dxcc field changed. Names differ in transliteration between the two
sources — Maykop against Maikop — and rewriting those was not asked for and
would churn 2660 lines to no purpose.
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 page was capped at 1100px — a comfortable reading width, and the right
choice for the eight default columns. Now that all 123 fields can be published,
anything past about eight sat behind a horizontal scrollbar on a screen wide
enough to show the lot.
Worse, Windows hides overlay scrollbars until something moves, so a table that
scrolled looked exactly like a table with its right-hand columns missing. That
is what was reported, and the report was reasonable: nothing on screen said
otherwise.
The wrapper grows with its content now, up to the window, and keeps a minimum so
a two-column table does not collapse on a large display. The table sizes to what
its cells need rather than being squeezed to the container first — that squeeze
could wrap a callsign while empty space sat further along the same row. And the
scrollbar is drawn permanently, thin and in the page's own colours.
Nothing computes a distance when a QSO is logged. The DISTANCE field is only
ever filled by an ADIF import that carried one, so publishing it straight gave
an empty column to anyone whose log was made in OpsLog — which is everyone who
reported it.
It falls back to the two locators, which are on the QSO already. A stored
distance still wins: it came from the log that recorded the contact, which knew
more than two four-character squares do. No grids means an empty cell, not a
zero — an empty cell is honest, a zero is a claim.
Rounded to whole kilometres. The squares are tens of kilometres across and a
decimal would assert an accuracy nobody has.
The geometry moved to internal/geo on the way. It lived in package main, which
internal packages cannot import, so the PSK Reporter watcher already had its
maths injected from main and this would have been a third copy. A bearing that
disagrees with itself between two panels is a fault nobody reports, because each
screen looks perfectly plausible on its own.
They were excluded as "per-QSO", alongside callsign and date. That rule confused
two different things: bulk edit is not for describing QSOs, it is for REPAIRING
a batch of them — an import that mapped every contact to SSB, an ADIF that
carried no MODE at all. Refusing because a hundred rows should not normally
share a value left the operator editing a hundred rows by hand.
Setting the mode CLEARS the submode. A submode belongs to the mode it was
recorded under; left behind it contradicts the new one, and "FT8 with a submode
of USB" is not a thing — worse, the submode is what most ADIF readers believe.
Band is still refused on its own, and that half of the rule stands. It travels
with the frequency through BulkSetFrequency, which writes the pair: a band
contradicting its own frequency is invalid ADIF, and every export would carry
the contradiction out into the world. Callsign and date stay out too — they
identify the contact rather than describe it.
A saved band selection outlives the code that made it. 12 m was removed from the
watched set, but every operator who had already enabled the watch kept
subscribing to it — paying for a firehose whose messages the detector then threw
away. The stored list is filtered against the offered one now.
The badge appeared on the next poll rather than on the event, up to twenty
seconds after the announcement, so the two read as unrelated things that happened
to mention the same band. It appears immediately.
And the toast is gone. It said the same thing as the badge and vanished after
five seconds — an operator who was tuning when it passed had no way back to it,
which is precisely what the badge was built to fix. Keeping both announced an
opening twice and still lost it once.
Abbreviating 1500 to "1.5k" and then appending "km" produced "1.5kkm", which
means nothing. Plain kilometres now.
Written correctly it would still have been wrong: "1.5k km" asks the reader to
do arithmetic to recover a number that was four characters long to begin with.
There was nothing to save.
It read "6M OPEN" and kept the rest in a tooltip nobody hovers — an alarm with
no content, announcing that something was happening and refusing to say what.
Band, direction and typical distance are on the badge now: the three facts that
decide whether to point an antenna, all readable without touching anything. Out
of season gets a mark there too, since that is the one an operator must not
learn last.
The compass point is computed in Go and carried on the Opening rather than
derived in the UI. Sector() already gets the wrap round north right, and it got
it wrong once — a second copy of that arithmetic is how a badge ends up naming
the opposite direction to the log line beside it.
set_split_vfo and set_split_freq both answered RPRT 0 and did nothing. WSJT-X
and JTDX in "Split Operating: Rig" send exactly that pair, believed both, and
transmitted on the RECEIVE frequency — on a pileup, straight onto the DX, while
showing the operator precisely what they had asked for. A lie that leaves no
trace in any log is the worst kind of bug this program can have.
The two commands are honoured as a PAIR. Arming alone does nothing on the radio,
because WSJT-X sends the frequency second and split armed on whatever the
transmit VFO happened to hold is worse than no split at all: it transmits
somewhere the operator never chose. The request is remembered and set_split_freq
does the work.
Kenwood gains SetSplit — FB to place the dial, then FR0/FT1 to arm, in that
order for the same reason. It writes what State() already knows how to read.
Everything else REFUSES, and that is the feature, not a shortfall. Only Flex and
Icom could even toggle split before, neither could set the transmit frequency,
and Yaesu, TCI and OmniRig have nothing at all. A refusal WSJT-X can report —
and act on, by falling back to Fake It — is worth far more than a success it has
no way to check.
Both paths are pinned: split reaching the rig as one armed call with the right
frequency, and a backend that cannot do it producing an error rather than RPRT 0.
IF reports the VFO "in use". In split that is the RECEIVE VFO while receiving
and the TRANSMIT VFO while transmitting — the backend took it as the receive VFO
in both cases. Everything therefore read correctly until the PTT closed and then
reversed, which is exactly how it was reported from a TS-590 on USB.
The IF frame has carried the transmit bit all along; parseKenwoodIF already
decoded it into f.TX. It was simply never consulted here.
This is not only a display fault. FreqHz is what a QSO is LOGGED on, so a
contact worked in split went into the log on the DX's frequency instead of the
operator's — wrong in the log, wrong in every ADIF exported from it, and
invisible until someone checked a QSO by hand.
The emulated rig in the test package can now be keyed, so the case is pinned
from both sides: verified failing without the fix (tx and rx exchanged) and
passing with it.
Every condition was joined by ONE global AND or OR. "2 m or 70 cm, in FT8, since
January" therefore had no expression at all: AND killed the two bands, OR let
every FT8 QSO through. The filter could ask simple questions and nothing else.
Rather than grow nested groups — a tree in the UI to answer something that is
nearly always "this field, any of these values" — the OR lives INSIDE one
condition and everything else keeps ANDing. Two operators, a comma-separated
value, no change to how the rest of the filter behaves.
Two edges that matter more than they look. An empty list matches NOTHING rather
than being dropped: dropping it would widen the result set, the opposite of what
someone typing a filter expects. And "is none of" wraps the column in IFNULL,
because raw SQL NOT IN discards NULL rows — a QSO with no band recorded is not
one of the listed bands, so it belongs in the answer.
SetMotorFollow went through SaveUltrabeamSettings, which tears the client down
and dials again. That is right when the transport changed and absurd for a
checkbox: the operator flipped tracking and watched the antenna disconnect and
come back, which on a remote controller is several seconds of a link that was
working perfectly.
The follow loop is a goroutine with its own stop channel and can be replaced on
its own — the connection underneath never knows. Only the two keys this call
actually changes are written, too: re-saving the whole block to change a
checkbox means re-normalising host, port, baud and bands, and every one of those
is a chance to alter something nobody asked to alter.
startUltrabeam now starts the loop through the same function rather than its own
copy. Two versions of "start the follow loop" drifting apart is how a step
change quietly stops taking effect.
It showed pattern, elements and Retract — everything except where the antenna
is pointed, which is the thing an operator changes most. Tuning it meant opening
Settings or moving the rig.
A button per band, taken from the bands configured in Settings rather than a
list invented here: a band dropped there cannot be clicked here. They point at
where people actually work, not the arithmetic centre — 20 m centres on 14175
and nobody lives there, 10 m spans 1.7 MHz of which the top half is empty.
Up and down move 25 kHz, which is also the finest tracking threshold: a smaller
nudge would be undone by the next poll while tracking is on. They work from the
ANTENNA's frequency, not the rig's, or walking the antenna across a band while
the rig stays put would be undone on the first press.
Tracking moved within reach because it is an operating decision — off to park
the antenna, on to resume — not something set up once. Its step only appears
when it is on: a threshold for something switched off is a question the operator
cannot act on.
MotorTuneKHz carries the CURRENT direction rather than resetting it. Both
controllers set frequency and pattern in one command, so a bare frequency would
silently drop a 180° or bidirectional pattern — a beam turning round is not an
acceptable side effect of clicking a band.
Club Log refuses with its ordinary web page rather than an error string, so the
new test reported a rejected login by pasting a 403 page — title, stylesheets,
navigation and all — into the status bar. The body now goes to the log, where a
real diagnosis happens, and the operator gets the one sentence there is to act
on: check the e-mail, the password and the logbook callsign.
Dropped the startyear=2099 filter with it, and that one matters more than it
looks. It was there to keep the reply small, but it was never verified against
Club Log's API — and Club Log answers an unrecognised request with the SAME 403
it uses for a refused login. An unverified parameter would therefore have made
every CORRECT password look wrong, which is precisely the failure this change
set out to end. The reply is capped at 4 KB and closed at once instead; the
status code arrives ahead of the body either way.
Band-opening detection had five entries in 0.24.5 — long paths, the PSK Reporter
feed, which bands, the densest sector, the region filter. Those are five steps I
took, not five things that happened to the operator, and the version read like a
work diary. Merged into one entry describing what the feature now does.
The 12 m mention went with them: it was added and removed inside this same
version, so it never existed as far as anyone reading this is concerned.
A PSK Reporter message says "X was heard BY Y". The watcher measured the
distance and bearing from the operator to X and stopped there, never asking who
had actually heard it — so a station 1400 km away, decoded by somebody in Japan,
counted as evidence. That proves the path from X to JAPAN and says nothing about
whether anything reaches this station. It is how a "2 m opening" came to be
announced out of a KX9X in the United States, and the operator was right to find
the callsign list absurd.
Reports are now kept only when the RECEIVING station is within 300 km. Far
enough to borrow the ears of a whole region — an opening reaches an area, not a
postcode, and waiting for a decode at one's own antenna is just working the band
— and close enough that the ionosphere doing something there is it doing the
same thing here. The transmitter still supplies the direction and the path
length, which is what was always wanted from it.
Also drops 12 m from the watched bands, at the operator's request: at this point
in the cycle it is open often enough that announcing it is a notification rather
than news, and a band that cries wolf costs the ones that do not. One fewer
subscription is also less traffic on a PC that pays for every message.
Two faults, both found from one field log: 70 000 decodes, 10 and 12 m plainly
open, nothing announced — and the two openings that DID fire named the wrong
direction.
evaluate() required EVERY distinct station in the window to fit inside one 90°
arc. That is the shape of a sporadic-E cloud and of nothing else. With 10 and 12
m open on F2 the reports arrive from all round the compass, the arc is 360°, and
the test can never pass — so the busier the band, the less likely an opening was
announced. Exactly backwards. It now finds the DENSEST sector instead, which
keeps the Es signature intact (a cloud still makes one direction dense) and lets
a real F2 opening be seen through the handful of neighbours who are always
there. Scattered-but-busy still reports nothing: the point was to stop demanding
global agreement, not to call every open band an opening.
Sector() averaged the two bearings arithmetically, so an arc crossing north was
labelled by its opposite: 353–61° averaged to 207° and went out as SW when it
was NE. Not a vague error — a reversed one, given to an operator who may turn a
beam on it. The detector has handled the 0/360 wrap since it was written; only
this label had not.
The only sign of a detection was a toast. It is gone in seconds, and an operator
who was tuning at that moment had no way back to it — for an event that lasts
hours and happens a handful of times a season, that is the wrong shape entirely.
The badge sits at the right-hand end of the status bar, before the clock: an
opening is a state of the WORLD, not of this station, so it belongs with the
time and the logbook rather than among the rig and amplifier chips.
Knowing when to go out was the real work. Nothing announces that an opening
ended, and the detector deliberately says nothing more about a band for 45
minutes after announcing it — right for a message, useless for a badge. So it is
inferred: every qualifying spot on that band pushes a deadline out, and when
they stop arriving the badge fades by itself. Fifteen minutes, comfortably more
than the detector's own twelve-minute window, so a quiet couple of minutes
mid-opening does not blink it off and on again.
Gated on the same distance floor the detector uses. Without that, a band busy
with short-range tropo would hold an Es badge lit indefinitely on spots the
detector itself had refused.
TestClublog checked that three fields were non-empty and returned "Ready — CALL
via EMAIL". Nothing was ever sent to Club Log, so a wrong password produced the
identical green message. It now signs in, through getadif.php because that is
the one authenticated endpoint that cannot change anything: a test must never
put a record into someone's log. A future start year keeps it from downloading
130 000 QSOs to prove a password, and a rejected login answers 403 before any
body arrives.
LoTW is two credentials doing two jobs and the button reported only the first.
Uploads go through TQSL signed by the certificate — the website password is
never involved — so a wrong one breaks nothing until the day confirmations are
downloaded, by which time nobody connects the two events. Both are now checked
and, more importantly, reported separately.
Also: the detector still refused 12 and 10 m while the PSK Reporter feed was
already subscribed to them, so those decodes were fetched and thrown away. The
rule was never "HF is out", it is "is an opening here an event" — 20 m being
open is the normal state of the band, 10 m opening is not.
Beside the rig and amplifier chips, before ON AIR, because it is the same kind
of fact they report: a link that is either up or it is not. Clicking it opens
the settings that control it, like the amplifier chips do.
Shown ONLY while the opening watch is on. A permanently grey chip for a feature
nobody enabled is clutter, and the bar is 28 px tall — every chip in it has to
earn its width.
Green once decodes are arriving, amber while connected but silent: those are
different states and an operator wondering why no opening has been announced
needs to tell them apart. The count itself is in the tooltip, not on the chip —
it moves several times a second on an open band, and a number flickering in the
corner of the eye is a distraction rather than information.
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.
The detector refused any path over 2400 km, reasoning that past a single hop the
bearing test stops meaning anything. That was wrong, and it discarded exactly the
openings worth announcing: Nexus flagged a 6 m opening at 5477 km that OpsLog
never saw, because the spots were thrown away before any test ran.
Multi-hop Es is ordinary on 6 m — 5000 km paths are common, 10000 km happens —
and it stays directional: a second hop leaves the sector the first one entered.
So the sector test, which is what does the real work here, holds perfectly well
at any distance. The ceiling was standing in for a judgement it could not make.
The floor stays at 500 km: a short 6 m contact is tropo or ground wave and says
nothing about the ionosphere. Both are now pinned by a test.
Both are ordinary Hamlib commands, and Nexus sends them around every transmit.
Refusing with RPRT -11 is permitted and a tolerant client carries on, but
nothing obliges it to — and while they sit in the log as "unimplemented" they
stay suspects every time something else goes wrong.
get_lock_mode answers 0, which is true: OpsLog never locks the dial against its
own clients. set_lock_mode is accepted and ignored, like set_vfo — there is no
lock to set, and failing would abort a client's transmit sequence over a setting
with no effect either way. stop_morse answers success because nothing is queued
here: CW is keyed by the rig's own keyer through the backend, never buffered in
this server, so "stopped" is accurate rather than polite.
Whether this is what Nexus is actually unhappy about is not established. It
removes two known irritants and two lines of noise from the log; if the trouble
persists, what remains in the log will be about the trouble.
It was sticky inside the scrolling list, and the rows went over it: a menu item
carries its own background and its own stacking context, so it wins against a
sticky sibling however high the z-index is raised.
The menu is a flex column now — a header that never scrolls, and the list
scrolling beneath it. Nothing to lose the fight with.
The first attempt laid 123 fields out on the page, sectioned by group. That
buried every other setting in the panel and was no easier to read than the flat
wrap it replaced — more surface, same problem.
One dropdown now, alphabetical, with a search box pinned at its top. Alphabetical
because any other order means hunting: the operator arrives knowing the name of
the field they want. The menu stays open while ticking, since picking eight
columns should be one visit rather than eight.
The chosen columns keep their place above it, in publication order — that list
answers "what will the page look like", which no catalogue can.
The catalogue held 23 hand-picked columns, so publishing a county, a satellite
pass or an award reference was simply not possible. It is generated from the
qso.QSO struct now — 123 fields — which also means a new ADIF field cannot be
forgotten here, as a hand-written list always eventually is.
Three keys were renamed to their ADIF names on the way (pota, sota, station).
An alias map keeps existing configurations publishing the same columns; without
it three would have vanished silently on upgrade, which is the worst way for a
setting to change.
The picker had to change with it: 123 chips in one wrap is a wall nobody reads
to the end of. It is sectioned by group, filtered as you type, and the chosen
columns sit on top in publication order — after picking eight out of a hundred,
the question stops being "what exists" and becomes "what did I pick".
The package doc said columns were curated so the operator's address could not
be published. That is no longer true and the comment now says so plainly: the
judgement moved to the operator, the default selection is unchanged, and nothing
is published that was not chosen.
Also collapses the changelog: four separate shared-CAT entries were one thing
from where the operator sits, and all of them were far longer than the one or
two sentences this project asks for.
Nexus sends set_ptt 0 about sixteen times a second, and every one of them became
an "xmit 0" to the FlexRadio — a write every 60 ms, for ever, saying nothing.
Repeating a state is not a request to change it. Only transitions reach the
radio now, and each is logged, so the next "it will not transmit" can be traced
to whoever asked rather than inferred from a wall of identical lines. The first
call always goes through: how the radio was left is not ours to assume.
This is not the whole of the reported symptom, and should not be read as such.
The log also shows "xmit 1" followed by "xmit 0" one to two milliseconds later,
off the 60 ms cadence — that is a genuine transition pair, so it still gets
through and the radio still unkeys at once. Those two commands come from the
client, not from here; the writes originate only in set_ptt, and there is no
loop in OpsLog that emits them.
Listen() succeeding is not the same as being reachable. OpsLog binds 0.0.0.0,
and Windows lets a second program bind the SAME port on the specific address
127.0.0.1. Connections to localhost then go to the more specific listener, so
every client reaches the other program while ours sits there having logged
"sharing CAT on port 4532" and never seeing a single connection.
Found with Nexus, which starts its own rigctld on 127.0.0.1:4532 and talks to
it. Neither side reports anything wrong: the operator gets a CAT timeout from a
daemon with no radio behind it, and OpsLog's log is silent because nothing ever
arrived. Three exchanges went into establishing that the connection simply never
reached us — the port table was what settled it, not the code.
So the server now dials its own port at startup and checks the connection lands
on its own accept loop. If it does not, it says which program will be receiving
the CAT connections and what to do. The counter it compares can only be raised
by our own accept loop, so a real client arriving during the probe makes the
check pass, never fail wrongly.
A client set to a RIG MODEL (Kenwood, Yaesu, …) pointed at the CAT-sharing port
speaks raw rig dialect: "ID;", "IF;". That is not rigctl, so it fell to the
unknown-command branch and got RPRT -11 like anything else.
The symptom hides the cause completely. RPRT -11 has no ';' for the client's
parser to terminate on, so it waits out its timeout and reports "reply
incomplete, got nothing" — a hard failure that reads as "OpsLog's CAT sharing
does not work", when it is one setting in the other program.
A frame ending in ';' with no space in it cannot be a rigctl command, so the log
now says what it is and what to set instead. Reported from Nexus, whose Hamlib
error named kenwood_transaction — the one word that gave it away.
cfdd24d shipped the "?;" tolerance with no changelog entry, against the
project's own rule. Placed before the CW entry: the link had to survive being
busy before anything keyed through it could matter.
CW over CAT never worked on a Kenwood. The KY implementation was written against
Elecraft's, which accepts a string of any length, so "KY OH5CX;" went out and a
TS-590SG answered "?;". OpsLog read that as "this radio refuses CW over CAT" and
told the operator to fit a serial keyer — advice that was wrong, and expensive.
The TS-590 manual is explicit: P2 has a fixed length of 24, blanks are filled
with spaces, and those spaces are not keyed. So the fix costs nothing on air; it
is simply the shape the command has. Elecraft stays variable-length, where
padding would key the trailing spaces as word gaps.
The semicolon is also gone from the allowed CW characters. It TERMINATES a CAT
frame, the manual forbids it in P2, and one in a macro would have closed the
command early and left the rest of the message to be read as commands.
Found from a log and a manual page, not from a rig: nobody here owns a Kenwood.
What is proven is the frame shape; that a TS-590SG then keys it still needs the
operator to confirm.
A Kenwood answers "?;" while it is busy, and the TS-590SG does it for a moment
after RX; — which is exactly when the poll resumes. One rejected IF; then tore
down the whole CAT link.
The code already knew this. Its own comment says a "?;" to IF; is "a transient
busy, NOT unsupported" and that latching it off "would read as lost the rig".
That reasoning was applied to the unsupported-command map and stopped there: the
call still returned an error, the poll loop still turned it into connected=false,
and the link still dropped.
What it cost was not cosmetic. WSJT-X keys through shared CAT, so it lost the
rig mid-sequence; Hamlib then sent "F 9223372036854775808.000000" - an
uninitialised 2^63 - which OpsLog refused and logged. The operator sees a
frightening frequency error whose actual cause is three lines earlier.
A "?;" is now sentinel-wrapped so the poll can tell "the rig declined" from "the
serial link is gone", and three consecutive ones are ridden out on the last
known state before the link is called dead. Under a second of tolerance: enough
for the rig to finish, far too short to hide an unplugged cable. A serial fault
is untouched and still drops immediately.
Tested against the emulated rig already in this package, with a hook that
answers "?;" on demand: the link survives inside the grace and still reports the
last good frequency, the count resets on recovery so a later busy spell gets the
full allowance, and a rig refusing forever is still reported as broken.
N0CALL is what WSJT-X transmits under when its owner never set a callsign. It
has a letter, a digit and an ordinary shape, so nothing rejected it: it was
spotted, coloured, counted as a new WPX prefix, and now that CQ grids are read
it would have put a grid into the worked index under a callsign nobody holds.
The obvious fix - adding it to looksLikeCall's reject list - was wrong, and the
test caught it before it shipped. That function answers "could this token be a
callsign at all", and the CQ grammar uses it to decide whether the word after CQ
is a modifier (DX, NA, a zone) or the call itself. Teaching it that N0CALL is
not a callsign made "CQ N0CALL JN36" skip a slot and return JN36. Shape and
policy are different questions and now live in different functions.
Chasing that turned up the real defect behind it: ANY unrecognised word after CQ
made the parser skip a slot, and a four-character grid passes every shape test a
callsign does. "CQ FOO JN36" returned JN36 as the sender - logged, spotted and
coloured as a station. A grid in the callsign slot is now refused outright.
An operator reporting "nothing happens for two or three seconds after I click"
was impossible to answer from opslog.log, because the first line applog writes
already sits inside startup(). Everything spent loading the binary and creating
the WebView2 environment happened before the log begins.
In one of the reported logs, startup() to window-visible is 251 ms end to end -
so whatever the wait is, it is not OpsLog initialising. It just could not be
proven, only asserted.
processStart is stamped on the first instruction of main. Two lines now bracket
the launch: how long was spent before startup() ran at all, and click-to-window,
which is the only number that matches what the operator experiences.
Finishes the half of this that was already computing on the backend and reaching
nobody. A Grid column in the Geo group, NEW GRID as a badge in Status, a filled
cell in the marker's own colour, and a filter chip.
new_grid joins lib/spotMarkers rather than getting colours of its own, so the
badge, the cell fill and the chip cannot drift apart - and the per-marker colour
setting will drive it with the rest from one table. Magenta: the last hue in the
categorical set not already spoken for, and one that does not read as a status,
because a new square is never urgent the way a new entity is.
The band map leaves it to the cluster, as it already leaves the prefix. The pill
is 22 px tall and its accent strip stops being readable past three segments.
A row carrying a new grid is no longer "dull", or the dimming would grey out the
one thing worth looking at.
The column is off by default, like the other Geo columns: it is only ever filled
for stations this receiver decoded over the UDP link, so for an operator who
does not run digital it would be a permanently empty column.
"No colour on worked" blanked the spot status as well as the worked-call flag,
on the theory that a spot bringing no novelty should stop painting entirely.
But the status is exactly what the cluster list reads to DIM a row. Blanking it
made isDull() fall through its "unresolved, never dim" guard, so every quiet grey
row came back at full brightness. The option meant to calm the list was the one
making it shout. It also forced a `muted` flag to exist purely so tooltips could
say that an empty status did not, this time, mean "entity not resolved".
It now removes the blue already-worked mark and nothing else, which is all it
ever needed to do: a worked entity already renders with no colour of its own and
is already dimmed. The flag, its two tooltip strings and the special-cased band
map styling all go with it.
The amplifier PUSHES status frames ("S0|state=…") on the same socket it answers
commands on, and it pushes them constantly once in OPERATE - power, SWR and
temperature all move while transmitting.
command() read exactly one line and took whatever arrived first as its answer.
One pushed frame therefore put the stream permanently one reply behind: every
later command read the PREVIOUS command's answer, and eventually one waited out
the 3 s deadline, failed, and dropped the connection. Hence a fresh TCP
connection and a fresh authentication every few seconds in the log.
The stall in transmit is the same defect seen from the other side: command()
holds the connection mutex across that whole dead wait, so SetOperate and every
other control queued behind up to three seconds of nothing.
It only appeared remotely and in OPERATE because that is when there is anything
to push - on a LAN with an idle amplifier the race hardly ever opens. Which is
why it did not do this yesterday.
readReplyLocked now reads until the R<id>| that belongs to the command, feeding
every frame it passes to parse() on the way - a pushed status is fresher than
the one we were about to ask for, so nothing is wasted.
authLocked used the same one-line read and worked around this by re-sending the
whole handshake, which is visible in the log as "auth reply=S0|state=IDLE
(try 1)" followed by a second attempt. It goes through the same reader now.
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.
AddQSO emitted qso:logged but never invalidated the cluster status snapshot.
The frontend did its part - it re-queried every visible spot two seconds later -
and ClusterSpotStatuses answered out of a snapshot built before the contact, so
it returned exactly the same "new band" as before. For ever, until an import, an
edit or a profile switch happened to invalidate it for another reason.
Reported twice: an E51 and then a ZD7 that stayed yellow on the band map with
the QSO plainly in the log. The first report was answered by fixing the
visibility gate, which was a real bug of its own and hid this one.
Confirmed against the operator's MySQL logbook rather than guessed: ZD7BG has
dxcc=250 on all eleven QSOs and 0 of 29579 rows lack a DXCC number, which ruled
out the missing-entity-number theory and pointed here.
Deliberately not invalidateAwardStats(): that also drops the award matrices,
which are expensive on a large log, and a contest run would pay for it once per
QSO. This index is a few DISTINCT scans and it is what the spot colours read.
Also fixes the new worked-grid query, which asked for a column named
"gridsquare". The column is "grid" - gridsquare_ext is a different one - so NEW
GRID could never have worked on either backend. Verified against the real
database: 12516 distinct grid|mode pairs.
RBN spotters report as "VU2OY-#" and cluster nodes as "DL1ABC-2". That string
went straight into the DXCC prefix matcher, which saw an unknown callsign and
gave up, so every spot came back with an empty continent.
The filter then matched nothing at all - and worse, silently: unresolved spots
are deliberately never dropped, because the status arrives a moment after the
row and filtering meanwhile makes the list flicker. So selecting AS left the
Europeans and the Americans exactly where they were, with nothing to say why.
A real callsign never contains a hyphen, so cutting at the first one is safe.
The panel had grown two shapes for the same kind of choice. Some filters were
checkboxes, some were chips, and New counties only was a checkbox duplicating a
chip - which I added, and which was the worst of it: a control that exists twice
is not more discoverable, it is one control the operator has to recognise twice.
The rule now:
SWITCH a behaviour that is on or off, and narrows nothing by a property of
the station: hide worked, group duplicates, the two display options,
LoTW users only.
CHIPS pick any number from a set; none picked means all. Status, mode,
spotter continent. Selected is solid, unselected is the same chip
faded, so the palette keeps teaching the colour code while switched
off.
Nothing appears in both shapes. The duplicate county checkbox is gone.
Spotter continent became a chip row: seven two-letter codes fit on two lines,
they read as a set the way Status and Mode do, and several can be picked at
once - which "EU or NA" needs and a dropdown cannot express.
Both Lock buttons now sit in the heading of the section they lock, instead of
floating between sections, and every multi-select section clears the same way
through the same heading slot. One section helper and one chip helper, so the
next filter cannot drift.
The panel was also entirely hardcoded English - Search call, Hide worked, Bands,
Status - against the project's own bilingual rule. All of it goes through t()
now, both locales.
The L badge is a single letter, not a word: the call column is 120 px and holds
a callsign. It keeps the muted blue of a confirmation and never a status colour,
because whether a station uploads to LoTW says nothing about whether the spot is
worth chasing - those are different questions and must not share a palette.
The spotter's continent is not the DX's. It asks whether anyone near you is
hearing the band at all, which is why it earns its own control rather than
reusing the existing Continent column. The spotter callsign now travels with the
status query so the backend can resolve it against the one DXCC prefix table,
instead of a second continent rule appearing in the frontend.
Both AND with the status chips rather than joining their OR: "a new band, and
from Europe" is the question being asked. An unresolved spot is never dropped by
them - the status arrives a moment after the row, and filtering meanwhile made
the list flicker.
New counties only is the SAME state as the NEW COUNTY chip, reached a second
way, not a second filter. County chasing is a mode you switch into, and hunting
for one chip among eight is not how you switch into it.
Backend groundwork; the columns and filters that consume it come next.
GRIDS. A CQ is the one WSJT-X message that carries a locator, and wsjtSender was
throwing that token away. It is now returned, validated as a real field+square,
and remembered per callsign. This is the ONLY grid source available: a DX-cluster
line carries the spotter's grid at best and never the DX's, and a per-callsign
QRZ lookup under an RBN firehose is not a trade worth making. So grids are known
for the stations this receiver decoded - which is exactly the FT8/FT4 watering
hole an operator is looking at while grid chasing.
RR73 is why the grid is validated rather than pattern-matched. R is inside A-R
and 73 inside 00-99, so a sign-off satisfies the Maidenhead shape exactly and
would have planted a grid that does not exist into the index, silently.
NEW GRID keys on "GRID|MODE" with the mode put through the same normMode as
everything else, so the "group digital modes" option decides whether a grid
worked on FT8 is still new on FT4 - one rule, no branch. Grids are truncated to
four characters: a log holds a mix of JN36 and JN36QU, and without that the same
square is new forever, once per subsquare.
On cost, which was the condition: one more DISTINCT scan when the status
snapshot is rebuilt, then map lookups per spot. The same shape as the county and
POTA sets it sits beside, and the snapshot exists precisely so a spot batch never
touches the logbook.
Spotter continent and the LoTW flag come from tables already in memory - the
DXCC prefix table and ARRL's user list - so they cost a lookup each. The spotter
continent answers a different question from the DX's: whether anyone near you is
hearing this at all.
parseFloat accepts a numeric PREFIX. "2026-08-10" therefore became the number
2026, every date in the same year compared equal, and since the sort is stable
nothing moved: the Date column looked as though it were simply not sortable.
The same trap caught every callsign starting with a digit - 8B81SU and 8P9AB
both read as 8 - and the times, where "09:56" became 9. The numeric test is now
anchored to the whole cell, so anything that is not entirely a number is
compared as text, which is exactly right for an ISO date.
Sorting had no way back either. Each row now carries the index it was published
at, and a third click on a header restores that order. Headers also show an
arrow: with no indicator, a column that silently refused to sort was
indistinguishable from one that had sorted into the same order.
Blank cells sink in both directions rather than leading the ascending sort. An
empty field is missing data, not the smallest value.
Tested where it can be: the page ships its own script, so a regression is silent
- the table still renders, it just sorts wrongly.
Colour moves from the text to the CELL. A filled Band cell means new band, a
filled Pfx cell means new prefix, a filled County cell means new county. This is
not the pills coming back: a pill is a box inside the cell with its own height
and padding, so it pushed the text off the row baseline. A background has no
geometry - the text does not move a pixel - and it reads from across the room,
which a tinted glyph does not. Worked-call stays text-only: it is not a novelty,
and filling it would wash most of the rows.
The colours still come from the semantic tokens and lib/spotMarkers, so a fact
keeps one colour across the grid, the band map and the filter chips - and the
per-marker colour setting will drive all of it from one table.
US County column. The backend already resolved the county from the offline ULS
store to decide NewCounty and then threw it away; it now returns it, which costs
nothing.
The Locator column is renamed Spotter locator. It always held the SPOTTER's grid
- cluster.go says so - so a column labelled Locator next to a DX callsign was
reading as the DX's grid and was mostly empty besides. The DX grid is not in the
feed at any price worth paying under an RBN firehose.
Both display options move out of Preferences into the cluster filter panel,
beside Hide worked. They are changed while working a run, not set up once, and
a preferences dialog reopened every ten minutes is a filter in the wrong place.
The slot-highlight option reused the new-slot status, which already meant
something else and something narrower: the ENTITY was worked on this band and
on this mode, but never on the two together. What the option surfaces is a fact
about the CALLSIGN - never worked on this band and mode - and the entity may be
long since confirmed there.
Overloading it cost exactly what it always costs. Forty consecutive rows read
NEW SLOT, the genuine new-slot rows drowned in them, and the Status column
stopped carrying information at all.
new-call is its own status now, with its own badge, its own tooltip spelling out
that it is the callsign and not the entity, and its own filter chip. It keeps
the caution colour for the moment: it sits at the same "worth a look, not a new
one" level as new-slot, and the colour rework will separate them.
The status filter had to move onto the displayed status too. It read the raw
backend entry, where new-call by construction never appears, so the chip would
have selected nothing at all.
The "colour the stations not worked on this band and mode" option did nothing.
The backend computed WorkedSlot correctly and the generated bindings declared
it, but the status map in App.tsx is assembled field by field from the reply,
and worked_slot was not on that list. The extra key was simply dropped, so the
frontend saw undefined, the === false test never matched, and every spot stayed
muted. Silent by construction: nothing warns that a copied-out struct is missing
a field. All three assembly sites now carry it, and the state type names it so
the compiler catches the next one.
The band map also memoised the transformed status map on spotStatusRaw alone,
so toggling an option changed nothing until a poll happened to hand over a fresh
object. The options are read at render time and are part of the dependencies.
Muting emptied the status, which dropped the spot onto statusStyle's default
branch. That branch paints bg-primary/60 - the theme's burnt orange at 60% over
a dark card, i.e. brown - and it was written for the rare unresolved entity,
where a hint of the accent colour is right because the operator should look.
With the mute option on, most of the map is muted. So the whole band map turned
brown and the spots that were meant to stop competing for attention were the
only ones tinted with the app's own "look here" colour.
Muted now lands on QUIET_STYLE: card background, grey border, grey accent bar
and leader. That is the same style the 'worked' status already used, so it is
now one constant rather than two copies - a muted spot and a worked spot are
the same statement and must not drift apart.
Three defects in the options added in the previous commit, all found on air.
Order. Mute returned early, so with both options on the mute swallowed exactly
the spots the slot option existed to surface: the mute test is entity-level, and
an unworked callsign inside a worked entity passes it. Slot promotion now runs
first, and protects itself for free since bringsNothingNew is false on new-slot.
The two were documented as composing - "mute what is done, light up what is
not" - and they did not.
Empty status. Muting emptied the status, but an empty status already meant
"entity not resolved" in the band map, so every muted spot claimed its entity
was unknown with the country printed two words earlier in the same tooltip. A
muted flag now records WHY it went empty; blanking still drives the colour, the
badges and the ranking.
Wording. The muted tooltip said "already worked" of a station never worked -
LZ8NG on a 421st Bulgarian. What is worked is the ENTITY on this band and mode,
so that is what it says now.
new-mode had no case in the band map's statusLabel and fell through to "entity
not resolved" too. Pre-existing, same one-line switch.
Two options that change what the eye is pulled towards, both applying to the
cluster list AND the band map.
Mute worked before: a spot that brings nothing new loses its colour and its
badges. It stays in the list - the operator asked for less noise, not less
information. "Brings nothing new" reuses the dimming rule the cluster list
already had rather than inventing a second notion of done, so it keeps obeying
the same-slot option and the digital-mode grouping for free. A new-band or
new-slot status is NOT muted: having worked that callsign once on another band
says nothing about the band in front of you.
Highlight unworked in this slot: colours any callsign not yet worked on this
band and this mode, whatever the entity says. For an operator filling slots a
common entity on a fresh band+mode is the whole point, and the entity-level
status flatly calls it worked. It reuses the existing new-slot status, so no new
colour, no new legend, no new badge - both panels already knew how to draw it.
WorkedSlot is computed independently of the same-slot preference: it is what
this option reads, and it must not change meaning because a different option was
toggled. The slot index is now built when either option needs it, and the status
cache is keyed on both so a toggle invalidates it.
The rules live in one module used by both panels. Marker colours already taught
us what happens when the two derive the same thing separately.
Observation, not prediction, and it needs no new data source: the cluster event
worker already enriches every spot with the great-circle distance and bearing
from the operator's grid, which is exactly what a single-hop Es detection rests
on.
The signature is four or more DISTINCT stations at 500-2400 km inside a 90
degree bearing sector within twelve minutes. Each constraint earns its place:
distinct callsigns because one station spotted by six skimmers is six spots and
one station; the lower bound because a 6 m contact under 500 km is ordinary
tropo and says nothing about the ionosphere; the upper bound because past one
hop the bearing test stops meaning anything; and the sector because a real Es
cloud illuminates a direction, which is what separates an opening from a merely
busy evening.
Fed AFTER the Historical guard in the worker. A SH/DX reply replays a hundred
past spots in a second - precisely the shape of a burst - and would announce an
opening that ended hours ago.
Season LABELS, it never gates. Both hemispheres get a summer peak and a lesser
winter one, and an opening outside those is announced with "unusual for the
season" attached: the rare one is the one an operator must not hear about last.
One announcement per band per opening (45 minute quiet period). An opening runs
for hours and produces hundreds of spots; one alert is information, forty is
noise.
Opened as soon as 0.24.2 is tagged, so the next change has somewhere to go and cannot end up described under a version that already shipped - which is exactly what happened to 0.24.1. Invisible until the build reports 0.24.3: GetChangelog drops every entry newer than appVersion.
v0.24.1 was tagged and shipped mid-session; the six commits that followed kept appending to its block, so the released version appeared to describe changes it does not contain. 0.24.1 is restored to exactly the five entries that shipped - verified against git show v0.24.1:changelog.json - and the five later ones open 0.24.2.
The band row was hardwired to 160-6 m, so an IC-9700 - the one radio in the range with no HF at all - showed ten dead buttons and none of 2 m, 70 cm or 23 cm. bandsFor(model) follows the model, exactly as attOptions already did for the attenuator steps. bandOfHz's labels had to move with it: it returned '70' where the button says '70cm', so the current-band highlight could never have matched, and it knew nothing of 23 cm.
Settings -> Web publishing. Renders the last N QSOs with the columns the
operator picks, writes the file locally, and optionally uploads it by FTP or
explicit FTPS.
Local write FIRST, upload second, always. A network failure then leaves a good
file on disk that can be published another way, instead of a truncated one on
the server. The local write itself goes to a temp file and renames over the
target, so a reader — or a syncing client — never sees a half-written page.
The HTML page is fully self-contained: inline CSS, inline sort script, no font,
no CDN, no external request at all. It has to work on hosting that blocks
third-party requests, and a page about someone's hobby should not report its
readers to anyone.
Columns are a curated set, not "every ADIF field". This is published to the
public: RST and QSL status belong on it, the operator's home address does not.
Two triggers, both debounced through one path: a QSO is logged, or the optional
timer fires. Fifteen seconds of coalescing means a run of contacts produces one
upload rather than one per QSO, and nobody reading a web page can tell the
difference.
The config is one JSON blob under a single settings key, and that key is marked
sensitive: the FTP password lives inside it, so the whole blob is encrypted at
rest with the others. A locked vault reads back empty, which correctly reads as
"not configured" — publishing must not run with a password it cannot decrypt.
The post-QSO status refresh was gated on the DX-cluster list being on screen; the band map draws the same statuses and was left out. Working a station in the ordinary layout - Recent QSOs left, docked band map right - left its pill NEW until the cluster tab happened to be opened. Reported on an E51 that stayed orange with the QSO already in the log.
OSM blocked OpsLog and every user's map filled with "Access blocked / 403"
tiles at once. Their policy is explicit: an application must identify itself
with a proper, unique User-Agent on every tile request. A program that draws
its maps inside a web view cannot do that — the browser sets that header and
Leaflet fetches tiles as plain <img> loads — so this is not something to tune,
it is a service we are not entitled to use.
Two layers still pointed there: the Street basemap and the locator map. Street
moves to Esri World Street Map, the locator map to Carto, both key-free and
both under terms that cover a redistributed application. OpenStreetMap keeps
its credit: Carto's tiles are built from OSM data.
The locator map also gains the tile restraint the world map already had —
updateWhenIdle, no fetching mid-zoom, one ring of buffer. Fetching as fast as
the pointer moves is another item on OSM's block list, and the replacement
providers are under no more obligation to tolerate it than OSM was.
The basemap preference key is untouched, so an operator who had picked "Street"
still gets a street map, from the new source.
A new county and a new park both drew --success, so the two were the same green
in the cluster list and, since the band map copied it, in the band map too.
County takes violet; POTA keeps green, the association being worth something.
Violet is a chart hue rather than a semantic token because every token was
already spoken for: red, orange and yellow are the entity statuses, blue is
"callsign already worked", green is now POTA. It is defined in both the light
and dark chart groups, so all eleven themes have it.
Changed in BOTH panels at once — separating them in one place would have left
the two views contradicting each other about the same fact, which is worse than
sharing a colour. To make that impossible to get wrong again, the marker
definitions move to lib/spotMarkers: key, colour and label in one table that the
cluster list and the band map both read. That table is what a per-marker colour
setting will drive, which is why it is a table and not three constants.
The band map deliberately shows three of the four markers. A new PREFIX stays a
cluster-list badge: the pill is 22 px tall and a fourth segment on its strip
turns it into a colour code nobody reads at a glance.
The band map coloured only the entity status and dropped the other three
markers on the floor — not for want of data: they were already in the status
entry it receives, the local type simply never declared them, so a new park on
an entity you have worked was indistinguishable from any other worked spot.
Colours are the DX-cluster list's, taken from it rather than chosen: --info for
a worked callsign, --success for a new county and a new park. The same fact must
not be blue in one panel and green in the next.
They STACK, they do not replace. These markers are orthogonal to the entity
status — worked entity plus new park is an ordinary combination — and the
cluster list already spells them out side by side rather than letting one win.
So the pill keeps the status colour and the markers take its left strip, split
into one segment each. That strip previously repeated the pill's own colour and
carried no information at all, which is what made it the right place.
Note that a new county and a new park share --success in the cluster list, so
they share it here too. Splitting them means changing both views together, which
is the moment to do it — when the per-marker colour setting arrives.
The input was bound straight to the number and committed on every keystroke, so
it could not be EMPTIED: clearing it yields "", Number("") is 0, 0 fails the
"> 0" guard, the state never moved, and value={qsoLimit} snapped the old figure
straight back. Going from 200000 down to 100 was a fight against the field — and
read as the setting refusing to persist, which it was not: writeUiPref stores it
and syncPortablePrefs makes the database authoritative at boot. It also wrote
the preference once per keystroke (1, then 10, then 100).
Raw text in local state, committed on blur or Enter, per the controlled-input
note in CLAUDE.md.
Opening the Awards panel pulls every QSO into a cached slice and kept it for the rest of the session: the cache was only ever invalidated by a logbook change, never by disuse. Each cached QSO is a 1896-byte struct plus its strings AND a decoded map of its ADIF extras - one map allocation per QSO. Harmless at 30k rows, several hundred megabytes at 132k, which is where it was reported. A janitor drops it after 15 minutes without a reader and calls FreeOSMemory, because Go hands pages back lazily and the whole point is that the operator sees the memory return. 15 minutes is deliberately generous: an awards session recomputes every few seconds and re-pulling a large remote logbook costs seconds. The heap size is now logged when the snapshot is built and when it is released - a memory report was unanswerable without a number.
Every line of cluster traffic went straight to state: a spread copy of a 2000-element array, a slice copy, and a React render, per line. An RBN feed sends hundreds a second, so that was tens of MB/s of garbage in the renderer and hundreds of re-renders - and it ran whether the console was open or not, so the cost was paid for a panel nobody was looking at. Reported on an old PC where the UI had stopped responding. Lines are staged in a ref and flushed on a 200 ms timer, the same shape the spot handler already uses. The staging buffer is bounded too, so a burst longer than the console can show is not carried in full just to be sliced away on commit.
Several operators hit "stage current exe: rename …\OpsLog.exe …\OpsLog.exe.old:
Accès refusé" and could not update again. Two separate causes, both ours to
handle.
The staging name was fixed. os.Rename replaces its target, so a single leftover
".old" that could not be deleted — a scanner holding it open is the usual
reason, and the pre-existing os.Remove was best-effort and ignored — made every
later update fail with that error, permanently, recoverable only by deleting the
file by hand. Staging now uses a unique ".old-<nanos>", which no leftover can
block, and the startup cleanup sweeps the pattern instead of one name.
Renaming a running image is legal on Windows, but some endpoint protection
(Bitdefender's ransomware remediation among them) blocks it outright, and no
retry gets past that. So the swap is deferred: the new build is parked beside
the old one and a detached helper moves it into place after this process exits,
when the file is no longer a running image. It keeps trying for ten seconds,
since a scanner tends to let go a beat after the process dies.
A short retry stays in front of both, for the ordinary case of a scanner holding
the file it has just watched being written.
If even the deferred move fails, OpsLog restarts on the CURRENT version rather
than leaving the operator with nothing — someone mid-QSO losing their logger is
worse than an update that waits — and only a successful swap passes
--post-update, so the download survives for the next attempt instead of being
swept by the cleanup.
Both band maps were pinned to a hardcoded width — 300px docked beside the
tables, 260px per card in the Band map tab. On a busy band the map could not be
given more room, and on a quiet one the log could not take it back.
The docked map becomes a resizable grid column with the grip in the gap between
the panes, so the handle costs no space; the tab cards share one width with the
grip on their right edge. Side-by-side columns of different widths read as a
mistake rather than a choice, which is why the tab has one width and not one
per card. Double-click either grip to return to the default.
The drag measures from the pointer's START position rather than the container,
so the same helper serves both edges — the docked map sits on the left or the
right depending on the operator's setting, and the grip is on its inner edge
either way. Pointer capture, like the main splitter: without it the map or the
grid under the cursor swallows the moves.
Both widths are persisted through writeUiPref and registered as portable, so
they travel with the data folder like the main splitter and the rest of the
layout.
The seven existing themes are warm beige, cool grey, sage grey, slate, warm
dark, graphite and black — every one neutral, six of the seven accented orange.
Picking a theme changed the shade of grey and little else.
These colour the SURFACES, not just the accent, and each takes a different
primary so the picker tells them apart at a glance: violet on deep indigo, cyan
on deep teal, magenta on aubergine, indigo on a crisp cool white.
The semantic colours stay recognisable as themselves. A logger is read for
hours and "red means a problem" cannot become a decorative choice, so the hue
budget went on the surfaces and the primary. Where a theme's primary would have
collided with a meaning, the MEANING kept its identity and the ornament moved:
Ocean's info is blue rather than cyan, Plum's danger is red rather than rose,
and the matrix entity ramp shifts to cyan under Indigo and teal under Nordic so
a "confirmed" cell never reads as a button.
Everything else follows for free: the grids resolve var(--…) at runtime, so
they re-skin with no re-render. The three shared registrations that do NOT
follow automatically are done — the chart palette (light vs dark ramp) and the
date-picker icon inversion, which is keyed on an explicit list of dark themes.
Prefix exists so a field holding a bare value counts for an award whose codes
carry a letter: a French operator writes "74" in STATE, DDFM's codes are "D74".
Def's own doc says exactly that. But searchOne applied the prefix AFTER looking
the token up in the reference list — after the step that had just failed — so
the bare form matched nothing and the prefix decorated an empty result. The only
way through was a regex, in a mode where the operator had chosen "code" and
explicitly not "pattern".
The token lookup now tries the prefixed form when the bare one is not a known
reference. The list stays the authority: an unknown number still matches
nothing, so the prefix completes references rather than inventing them.
Second bug in the same pass: the blanket prefix also hit codes that came
straight OUT of the list, so a field already holding "D74" produced "DD74" as
soon as a prefix was configured — for both the token lookup and the
description matcher. Branches that yield whole codes are now excluded from it;
the ones that yield a raw capture (regex, whole-field split) still get it.
A forwarder (W&P, seen in the field in front of MSHV) prepends the origin as
plain text before re-broadcasting:
"127.0.0.1:2237|" + <the original, untouched WSJT-X packet>
That puts the magic 15 bytes in, so every datagram failed on "bad magic
0x3132372e" — those four bytes being ASCII "127." — and an operator running
MSHV behind the relay saw no decodes, no callsigns and no auto-logged QSOs.
No new service type: what follows the header IS a WSJT-X packet, so the parser
and everything downstream apply unchanged, and a separate type would duplicate
decode, status and logged-ADIF handling to strip 15 bytes. ParseWSJT skips the
header instead, which also covers any other relay that wraps traffic this way.
The match is deliberately narrow — the magic must fall within the first 64
bytes AND every byte before it must be printable ASCII. A corrupt or truncated
packet that merely contains those four bytes somewhere is not resurrected into
a QSO; it fails exactly as it did before.
Test data is the real captured datagram, header included.
"WSJT parse error: bad magic 0x3132372e" named neither the sender nor the
payload, so there was nothing to act on — even though those four bytes are
ASCII "127.", i.e. some program broadcasting an address on a port expecting
WSJT-X binary.
The line now carries the remote address, the size, a printable preview and a
hex dump of the first 96 bytes. Text senders are readable at a glance; a
genuinely binary payload still shows its bytes.
And it stops after five. The reported case wrote that line about 150 times a
second: a permanently misconfigured port would fill the 10 MB rotating log with
one repeated sentence and bury every other piece of evidence — the log's whole
purpose. The fifth line names the two things worth checking, the sender and the
service type.
N1MM's parse error goes through the same path; it had no packet detail either.
The award editor offered five confirmation sources and Def's own doc comment
named five, but confirmed() had cases for three. "qrzcom" and "custom" fell
through the switch, so ticking either marked nothing as confirmed — the exact
failure the GrantCodes comment in this struct warns about: a checkbox that does
nothing is worse than no checkbox, because it is trusted.
QRZ.com reads qrzcom_qso_download_status, not the upload one: uploading a QSO
is us telling QRZ about it, which confirms nothing.
Custom names a field. Rather than a checkbox per external source, the Def gains
ConfirmField + ConfirmValue: any QSO field or ADIF extras key, and optionally
the comma-separated values that count. That one shape covers the three cases
asked for — the OpsLog card marker (APP_OPSLOG_QSL_RCVD), an arbitrary ADIF
tag, and a tag stamped by an imported club list — because all three end up as a
field on the QSO.
An empty ConfirmValue means any non-empty content confirms: the OpsLog marker
stores the date the card arrived, not a Y/N flag. A custom source naming NO
field confirms nothing, deliberately — the opposite default would silently mark
a whole logbook confirmed.
Windows parks a minimised window at -32000,-32000 with a stub size and reports
it as not-maximised, so closing OpsLog from the taskbar while minimised stored
exactly that. Seen in a log: "window: saving -32000,-32000 237x39
maximised=false".
The restore side already rejects both the impossible corner and the
below-minimum size, so nothing opened off-screen — but it fell back to the
default placement, and the operator silently lost the size, the position and the
maximised state they had set.
saveWindowState now keeps what was already stored when the window is minimised.
Two tests for that: the Wails flag, and the -32000 corner, because a window that
is mid-close can sit at that corner with the flag already cleared. A poisoned
window.json repairs itself on the next close of an on-screen window.
The stamp answers "PSE QSL", so it reads as its counterpart or not at all: a
bare "TNX" next to a QSL message says thanks for something unnamed.
Changed at the source of the {qso.pse_tnx} token, so every card picks it up
with no template edit. The live indicator in the QSO editor and the hint beside
it follow.
The previous commit added its row to the status table but left the picker
listing only the column-backed channels, so the one channel you could actually
tick was the one you could not select.
Selecting it swaps the left panel for an OpsLog editor instead of the generic
sent/received/date grid, which has no fields to bind to here: Sent is shown
read-only (OpsLog stamps it when the card goes out), Received is the tick, and
the PSE QSL / TNX indicator sits next to them since that stamp is what the flag
is for.
The OpsLog QSL marker sat under QSL Msg in "Contact's details", nowhere near
the channel it belongs to, while the QSL Info tab listed every other
confirmation — QSL, LoTW, eQSL, QRZ.com, Club Log, HRDLog — with a Sent and a
Received column.
It now has its own row in that table and the "QSL received" tick moved to the
same tab, keeping the PSE QSL / TNX indicator that is the reason the flag
exists at all: received prints TNX on the card, otherwise PSE QSL.
Written by hand rather than added to CONFIRMATIONS: that table maps QSO
columns, and this channel is backed by ADIF extras (APP_OPSLOG_QSL_RCVD, plus
the older APP_OPSLOG_QSL_CARD_SENT for the sent side). Sent stays read-only —
OpsLog stamps it when a card actually goes out, and a hand tick would record
something that never happened.
Typing RK3DWA found nothing while RK3DWA/3 found 21 QSOs, so a station's
history was only visible if you happened to type the exact form it had been
logged under — and an operator who worked it as /0, /P or /MM saw none of it.
The other RDA tools and Log4OM fold these together; this does too.
The predicate strips the suffix from what was typed and matches "call = base OR
call LIKE base/%", so it works from either end: the base call finds the portable
QSOs and a portable call finds the plain ones. Deliberately not a bare prefix
LIKE 'RK3DWA%', which would also match RK3DWAB — a different station. The '/' is
what makes it the same operator.
Settings -> General to turn it off. Default ON, hence the inverted storage: an
existing install has no key, and reading that as OFF would leave everyone with
the behaviour we were asked to change.
Contest dupe checking is untouched — it runs through ContestDupe, a separate
binding, and stays an exact match as a contest requires.
Settings -> DX Cluster: a toggle and an interval. When it is on, logging a QSO
announces the station on the master cluster — the QSO's own station callsign as
the DX, on the frequency the contact was made on — so callers find the run
without waiting for someone else to spot it. The node fills the DE field from
the login, so the spotter is us too: a self-spot.
It fires on the FIRST QSO of a frequency and then at most once per interval.
Both halves matter: announcing every QSO would flood the node and get the
station filtered out, while a pure timer would stay silent for minutes after a
band change. A drift of up to 500 Hz still counts as the same run, so nudging
the VFO mid-pileup does not re-announce.
Five minutes is the floor, clamped in SaveSelfSpotSettings as well as in the
input: the limit protects the node from us, so it must not depend on the
frontend. The interval input keeps raw text and clamps on blur — clamping per
keystroke rewrote "10" to "5" as soon as the "1" landed.
Wired into both log paths (manual entry and UDP auto-log) on the async side, so
a cluster that is slow or down never holds up logging. A send failure restores
the previous throttle state, so the next QSO retries instead of sitting out an
interval that produced no spot.
The Kenwood/Elecraft backend deliberately suspends its wire poll while PTT is
held — a K3 answers "?;" to IF; during transmit, and treating that as a fault
used to drop the whole CAT link. The consequence was that nothing watched the
transmitter: a client that crashed, was closed, or simply had its socket shut
under it left the rig on air.
And shutting the socket is routine. reloadCATShare tears the sharing server
down and rebuilds it on every settings save, so a Save while WSJT-X held PTT
was enough. A K3 operator's log shows exactly that: "TX;" at 17:53:09, no "RX;"
ever, the poll silent, and the rig still keyed 29 s later when the CAT link
happened to be rebuilt.
The server now drops PTT when a connection ends and when Stop() is called.
Stop() runs before reloadCAT restarts the backend, so the unkey still reaches
the radio. An atomic Swap keeps it once-only across the two paths.
MD6 is FSK on a Kenwood and DATA on a K3/K4. kenwoodModeToADIF decoded the
digit unconditionally as RTTY, so OpsLog contradicted the mode it had just
set: SetMode writes MD6 for a digital mode on an Elecraft, then ReadState
parsed the IF frame back as RTTY.
A K3 running FT8 therefore showed RTTY in the status bar, logged its QSOs on
RTTY, and — through the shared CAT server — told WSJT-X/JTDX the rig sat in
RTTY while they had just asked for a data mode. Found in a K3 operator's log:
every cat:state line read mode=RTTY on 21.074 FT8, two lines after OpsLog's
own "MD6;".
The digit now resolves to the configured digital mode whenever MD6 means DATA
on this rig — the Elecraft backend, and the "DATA A - MD6" data-mode option
that exists for it. A plain Kenwood still reads MD6 as RTTY.
One station reaches the log SHOUTED by QRZ, lower-cased by a hurried
operator and in whatever case an imported ADIF carried, so the same name
appears three ways across a log. Name and QTH are now title-cased word by
word; Comment and Note only get a capital first letter, because the rest
routinely holds callsigns and modes ("TNX QSO F5ABC, FT8 59") that
lower-casing would destroy.
Normalised on blur, never per keystroke — rewriting the value mid-word
fights the typist (the controlled-input trap in CLAUDE.md). Applied in
both entry layouts and in the QSO editor, since leaving the editor alone
would just reintroduce the mess on the first correction.
The Recent QSOs box only ever searches callsigns, so it upper-cases as
you type and carries an inline clear button.
Award columns were filtered out of the persisted column state entirely,
so applyColumnState({applyOrder:true}) had nowhere to put them and AG
Grid appended what the state does not mention. A column the operator
dragged to sit AFTER an award column therefore jumped back in front of
it on every reload.
Only the `hide` property is dropped now. Visibility stays owned by the
awardShown code-set — that is what stopped shown award columns from
vanishing on an awardCols rebuild — while the position survives the
round-trip.
The Settings -> Database panel had lost every action on the settings
database except "Open folder", which launches Windows Explorer — where a
.db cannot be selected at all, so double-clicking it only asks which
program should open it. The handlers were still there, just no longer
rendered; New / Open existing / Save a copy / Rename / Reset are back,
along with the restart banner (the DB pointer is only read at startup).
The backup block put the rotation field and three checkboxes on one flex
row inside max-w-xl. That fitted until "keep every backup" arrived with
its two-line hint, after which every label wrapped into an unreadable
sliver. The options are stacked now, and keep-all sits under the option
it depends on.
Stale since the 0.23.9 work: SetOpsLogQSLReceived, the backup keep_all
flag, the award PRIMARY search prefix and the default QSL message were
all missing from the generated bindings.
The Elecraft handling was buried in the Kenwood "data mode" option, so users
couldn't find it. Add "Elecraft K3/K4" as its own entry in the CAT backend
selector. It reuses the Kenwood-dialect transport and the Kenwood USB/network
settings (the K3 emulates the Kenwood command set — a separate transport would be
a near-total duplicate), with an `elecraft` flag on the client that forces
digital modes to DATA A (MD6+DT0) — no data-mode dropdown needed. RigState still
reports Backend "kenwood" so the CW-over-CAT keyer capability keeps working.
Integrates the fix/jtdx-kenwood-tx work onto main: the Kenwood/Elecraft backend's
"data" data-mode path now sends MD6 then DT0 so a K3/K4 lands in DATA A — the
audio sub-mode FT8 uses. MD6 alone could leave the rig in an FSK/PSK sub-mode
where it keyed but the rear sound-card audio never modulated ("transmits but
nothing comes out"). The data-mode option is relabelled "DATA A — MD6+DT0
(Elecraft K3/K4)". A shared Kenwood/Elecraft backend is kept (the K3 emulates the
Kenwood dialect); the Elecraft specifics live behind the data-mode seam rather
than a 7000-line duplicate backend.
Only OrRule had a Prefix ("prepended to each found reference", e.g. postal 74 →
D74); the primary search passed "" for prefix, so an award whose references are
D01/D02… couldn't prepend the D on its main rule — only on OR fallbacks. Add
Def.Prefix, pass it into the primary run(), and expose a Prefix input next to the
primary Leading/Trailing fields in the award editor.
Sub-option of "back up on every exit": when on, backup.Run/RunADIF stamp the
filename with the time (opslog-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.db) so each run is a distinct
file instead of overwriting the day's snapshot. Rotation still trims to the
newest N (raise Rotation for a longer history). Threaded as a `unique` flag
through runConfiguredBackup/backupLogADIF from BackupSettings.KeepAll
(keyBackupKeepAll); UI sub-checkbox shown only when EveryExit is on.
autoLogFromUDP (the inbound WSJT-X/JTDX/MSHV log path) inserted the QSO but,
unlike the manual LogQSO path, never called a.udp.EmitLoggedADIF — so a QSO
received from MSHV was not re-emitted to the outbound ADIF listeners (Log4OM,
N1MM, GridTracker…). Emit it in the same async goroutine. A pathological
self-loop is broken by the existing ±2-min dedup, which returns before the emit.
Received flag: new APP_OPSLOG_QSL_RCVD extra, toggled on the QSO edit window
next to QSL Message (immediate targeted write via SetOpsLogQSLReceived so it sets
AND clears reliably), plus a live PSE QSL / TNX indicator and a Recent-QSOs
column mirroring the sent one.
PSE/TNX card stamp: automatic — received → TNX, otherwise PSE QSL — exposed as
the {qso.pse_tnx} token (added to qslVars, so preview and send agree) and placed
in the default QSO-box footer; it can be moved to its own element in the designer.
Default QSL message: new qsl.default_message (QSLEmailTemplates.DefaultMessage),
edited under Settings → E-mail → QSL card e-mail. qslVars falls back to it when
the QSO's own QSLMSG is empty, so a per-QSO message always wins. Single choke
point covers both live preview and send.
New BackupSettings.EveryExit (keyBackupEveryExit) with a Settings → Backup
checkbox. When on, the three shutdown-backup gates (plannedShutdownSteps,
runBackupForShutdown, maybeShutdownBackup) bypass the HasBackupToday /
HasADIFBackupToday "already done today" check and always run, so a second
session's QSOs are captured instead of skipped until the next day. The dated
backup file for today is refreshed (overwritten) each exit; prior days are still
kept by rotation.
constTYPE_LABEL: Record<string,string>={webswitch:'WebSwitch 1216H',kmtronic:'KMTronic 8-relay',denkovi:'Denkovi USB (FT245)',usbrelay:'Denkovi USB (serial)',dingtian:'Dingtian IOT relay'};
// ADIF's QSL_Rcvd enumeration has BOTH Y and V: Y is "received", V is
// "verified" — and V is what a LoTW download writes for a confirmation the ARRL
// has validated. Testing for 'Y' alone therefore misses exactly the
// confirmations an operator cares most about.
//
// It showed on screen: the Awards panel had Morocco validated on five bands
// while the band/mode matrix beside it showed the entity as merely worked. The
// award engine accepted Y or V; every other test in the app accepted Y.
//
// The Go side has the same rule twice over — award.isYes and qso.ConfirmedValues
// — and all three have to agree. If you add a value here, add it there.
exportfunctionisQSLConfirmed(v: unknown):boolean{
consts=String(v??'').trim().toUpperCase();
returns==='Y'||s==='V';
}
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