HamClock 4.09 has just been released and the familiar POTA and SOTA panes have been replaced by a single pane called “On The Air” (displayed as “On Air” if it’s set to show in the tall left panel). It adds a new organisation, World Wide Flora & Fauna, abbreviated to WWFF and has been designed to allow easy addition of extra organisations.
When you first launch HamClock 4.09 and enable On The Air, you’ll see that it displays spots from all available organisations and that can make it difficult to easily see whether you’re looking at POTA, SOTA or WWFF spots.
To change this behaviour, click on the word ‘All’ under the title and this box will open.
Click on the Org: line and in there you can type the name of the organisation you wish to view. In this instance, just enter POTA.
And click on Ok.
The pane will redraw and as can now be seen by the word POTA under “On Air”, it’s only displaying POTA spots.
If you want to see both POTA and SOTA spots, click on POTA under the title and the box will open again. Now add SOTA to the Org: line.
And click on Ok.
And now the magic starts. The pane will automatically switch between POTA and SOTA using the interval configured for pane rotation on Page 5 of the setup.
You can add WWFF in as well using the same technique.
Or you can pick any other combination and the pane will rotate automatically between them.
If you hover over a callsign in any list (either On The Air or DX Cluster), a couple of things will happen. Here, I’ve hovered my mouse over VE2JCW in the list. The info box at the top left corner of the map has opened showing me the full details, including the callsign, the reference, the organisation (POTA), the mode and the full frequency, including a decimal point. The previous POTA and SOTA panels always rounded the frequency off so it’s now possible to get the full frequency. You can also see the exact age of the spot, local time, distance, etc etc. The station is also highlighted on the map with a nicely visible red/black circle.
To the right of the organisation reference, there can be one of three age indicators. A space indicates that the spot is less than ten minutes old, an m indicates that it’s over ten minutes old but less than one hour and an h (not shown) indicates the spot was received an hour or more ago.
The pane can be located at the side (as has been shown here) or at the top. If it’s at the top, it just shows fewer stations but the functionality is the same.
How to use the new ‘Title’ feature
HamClock uses your callsign (as configured on Page 1) for quite a lot of background processes such as PSK Reporter lookup, RBN lookup, WSPR lookup and other things. Because of that, it needs to be a valid callsign. As of V4.09, the requirements for the callsign in the setup have been tightened up. It must include at one or more letters, one or more numbers and no punctuation other than a slash. This should allow all possible valid amateur radio callsigns. You are strongly encouraged to put your full callsign in the appropriate field on Page 1.
Your callsign is displayed on the main HamClock screen in the top left corner. Here’s mine.
However, for whatever reason, you may not want to show your callsign here. This is where the new ‘title’ feature comes in.
As mentioned above, please ensure you have your callsign entered correctly on Page 1 of the setup. Then when HamClock is running, click somewhere in the centre area of your callsign on the main page and this box will pop up.
In the Show: line, select title and then you can type whatever you want in the Title: line below. Here you can see I’ve put QSO365
Then when you click Ok, your title will be displayed instead of your callsign.
As a reminder, you can have either On The Air, Contests or DX Cluster in the large vertical panel on the left, replacing DE and DX. To do this, first make sure that the required pane is not showing along the top of the screen because you can only have each pane visible in one place at a time.
Then click on DE and this menu will open.
Select Data Panes and then any of the three options below that. If you select more than one, HamClock will rotate between them.
So how do I get “On the Air” Panel on the left side of the screen?
The very last paragraph and the last picture explains exactly how to do this.