Settings & Configuration¶

Swipe in from the right edge to open the settings drawer. All settings are saved automatically.

The top two buttons are not settings but the two ways into help: User Manual, which opens this guide at the chapter for the screen you came from, and Need guidance?, which lists symptoms and questions in plain words. See Getting Help.

Basic and Advanced¶

The drawer is grouped under headings — Station, Device, Radio, Network, Display, FT8, WSPR and Spectrum — and the button beside the Settings title chooses how much of it you see. It reads BASIC or ADVANCED; tapping it swaps between them. (It said EXPERT until v1.10.0, which described the reader rather than the contents.)

Advanced holds everything. Basic holds the sections an operating session actually reaches — Activation, QMX volume, RF gain, SWR protection, Antenna Tune, WiFi setup, Display brightness, and the FT8 group's distance and reporting options, plus the four WSPR sections when you are on the WSPR page. That is what Basic is for: it is the operating set, not a beginner mode. Nothing is lost in Basic; it is only hidden.

Which sections appear in which view is yours to set (v1.10.0). In the web UI, open Settings and click Tab5 config next to Save: every section in the Tab5's drawer is listed in drawer order with a Basic and an Advanced tick. A section can be in both, in one, or in neither — neither being a legitimate answer meaning you never want to see it. It is deliberately edited from the browser rather than from the Tab5, so it stays out of the way of anyone who just wants to operate.

A firmware update that adds a new setting shows it rather than hiding it behind a layout you saved before it existed — the device records which sections were known when you saved, so anything newer than that takes the shipped default instead of reading as "unticked".

This layout is stored on the device and is deliberately not part of a config backup: it is a preference about the menu, not a station or radio setting.

Radio¶

These reach the QMX itself over the CAT link.

QMX volume — the radio's own AF gain, in decibels, the same number the QMX shows on its LCD when you click its volume knob. Read back from the radio when you open the drawer, so it agrees with the rig even if you last changed it there.

QMX RF gain — the per-band RF gain from the radio's Band Configuration, 0–99 dB (the QMX default is 54). Because it is per band, the Tab5 reads it from the radio rather than remembering a number that would belong to whichever band you were on last; it shows "reading…" until the radio answers, and "radio not connected" if the radio is not there at all. Until v1.8.3 it could stick on "reading…" for a whole session: the value was only ever repainted when you next opened the drawer, so a single unanswered query left it stuck (reported by Samuel W7STF). It now fills itself in as soon as the radio replies. It writes when you let go of the slider, not while you drag, because this is stored configuration rather than a session setting. Changing it moves the noise floor, so the flat-spectrum reference is re-learned.

Show decoded CW — the line along the bottom of the panadapter carrying the Morse the radio is decoding, in CW/CW-R. On by default. The QMX does the decoding itself, so switching this off frees no processing — only the screen space; see the Decoded CW section of the Panadapter guide for what the line shows and how the noise is filtered. The same setting is in the browser under Radio & display.

CW profiles — a CW centre frequency together with the filter widths to offer with it, so a setup you use often is one tap rather than two menus on the radio (suggested by Uwe DL8UG: "setting this on the QMX is always a bit of a chore, and half the time you do not have the right values in your head anyway").

There are four slots. Edit them in the browser's Settings window, under CW profiles: a name, a centre frequency, and a tick for each width you want the bandwidth list to offer. Apply one from the button beside it, or from CW profiles in the Tab5's settings drawer, where the four slots appear as four buttons.

The centre must be 500–950 Hz in steps of 25, which is what the radio accepts. Anything else is corrected as you leave the box, so what you see is what will be stored.
Names are cut to nine characters — that is what fits on the Tab5's buttons.
Leave the centre empty to clear a slot.

!!! warning "Applying a profile changes your radio's stored configuration"

It writes the CW centre and all eight filter rows, then asks the radio to
reload — which takes about a second, and briefly interrupts reception. It is
a deliberate, once-a-session action rather than something to tap while
operating. Every write is read back and retried, and the bandwidth list is
re-read from the radio afterwards, so what the Tab5 offers is what the radio
really has.

Note that setting the CW centre also moves the radio's CW offset and
sidetone with it, which is the QMX's own behaviour and not something the
panadapter chooses.

CW transmit offset — transmit a little away from the station you are listening to, so a QRP call is not buried in the pile of everyone zero-beating the DX (suggested by Roy KI0ER). The centre of the slider is off, and the sign chooses whether you transmit above or below.

Keep it small: around 100 Hz or less is typical, and the slider stops at ±300. The point is to land inside the other station's filter, not outside it — most CW operators run a 500 Hz filter or narrower, 200 Hz is not unusual, and the passband is not equally usable right to its edge: the tone gets muddy and a QRP signal has least energy exactly where the filter is already attenuating (Michael KZ4LY). Roy KI0ER uses +60 Hz on his own rig. Earlier versions of this page suggested 400–600 Hz, which is outside many operators' filters altogether.

!!! note "Your QMX may keep showing two frequencies afterwards"

The offset works by putting the radio in split — receive on VFO A, transmit on
VFO B. When you switch the offset off, the panadapter returns VFO B to VFO A and
drops split, and it confirms both by reading the radio back.

The QMX's own LCD may nevertheless keep showing a second frequency until you
change band or power-cycle it. That is a display artifact: nothing repaints the
second row of the LCD when the VFO mode returns to A over CAT (confirmed by
Stan KC7XE, and known on the QRP Labs list). **You are not transmitting off
frequency** — VFO B equals VFO A and split is off.

Do not use the `MU;` command to tidy it up. It does clear the display, but it
also silently drops the radio's I/Q mode, and the panadapter's spectrum goes
flat while the radio keeps streaming audio as though nothing had happened.

The QMX has no XIT, so this is done with split: you receive on VFO A and transmit on VFO B, which the Tab5 holds at your receive frequency plus the offset. Set it once and it follows you — a tap on the panadapter, a spot, a memory recall, a band change, the web page, and the radio's own tuning knob. It applies in CW and CW-R only, and leaving CW clears it. If you are running your own split, the Tab5 leaves it alone.

Let me use the QMX menus — hands the radio back. The QMX's own menu, and its Band Configuration terminal application, talk over the same USB serial port the Tab5 polls several times a second, so the two fight over it. Tap this before using the radio's own menus: the Tab5 stops sending anything, the spectrum freezes, and a blue bar across the top says so and gives the radio back when you tap it. Resuming re-checks IQ mode, which a trip through the radio's menu can switch off.

While the radio is released the Tab5 will not transmit — an armed FT8 burst and Antenna Tune are both refused rather than keying a radio you are holding.

Radio menus — the QMX's own menu system on the Tab5's screen, so you do not have to reach the radio at all. Unlike the button above it, this does not stop the panadapter: it uses the radio's second USB serial port, so CAT keeps running while you are in the menus. You have to switch that port on once, on the radio — System config -> GPS & Ser. ports -> USB serial ports -> 2. For a QMX+ with no control panel this is the only way into its menus. See Radio Menus.

Operator Info¶

Callsign — Your amateur radio callsign (required for FT8/FT4 logging).

Grid Square — Your Maidenhead grid square (e.g., JO45; required for FT8/FT4 exchanges).

WiFi¶

Tap WiFi setup in the settings drawer to open the WiFi window.

WiFi On/Off — the WiFi icon button in the WiFi window (shown with a diagonal red slash when off). Toggling it takes effect immediately — off disconnects and stays off; on reconnects right away. Turning WiFi off is useful for field operation (no WiFi overhead, extended battery life).

SSID — Your WiFi network name. Tap Scan to list nearby networks and pick one (as of v1.3.6 this also works when your stored network is out of range — hotels, POTA sites — where it previously always reported "No networks found").

Password — Your WiFi password (pre-filled with your saved password; tap the eye icon to show/hide it). Tap Save to store it and connect.

Once connected, the settings show your IP address — use this to access the web UI from a browser.

Static IP address / Subnet mask / Gateway / DNS server — set in the web UI's Settings window under WiFi (there is no Tab5 equivalent for typing them — four addresses on glass is no kindness). Leave the address empty for DHCP, which is what every unit does by default, so nothing changes unless you fill it in. It takes effect the next time the Tab5 connects.

Leave the mask, gateway and DNS blank unless you have a reason not to. They are filled in from the address the Tab5 currently holds, so on an ordinary network you only have to type the address itself — and on anything that is not a plain 255.255.255.0 network, that is also the part most easily got wrong by hand.

An address on the wrong network is refused. The Tab5 compares what you type against the network it is on and will not accept an address that would put it somewhere else, telling you both. If you are deliberately setting a unit up for a different network, confirm when it asks and it will be stored as typed.

Use DHCP — a button in the Tab5's settings drawer, under WiFi setup. It appears only when a static address is configured. One tap arms it, a second clears the address and restarts on DHCP. This is the way back if a static address ever leaves the web page unreachable, and it needs nothing but the Tab5 itself. The bottom bar always shows the address the unit actually has.

Time Sync¶

SNTP Server — NTP pool (usually pool.ntp.org). Change only if you have a local NTP server.

Setting the time by hand — there is no control for this in the drawer, despite what earlier versions of this guide said. The clock is set from the FT8 screen: Options -> Sync Time. See Setting the time by hand, which also covers setting the seconds — the part that matters with no WiFi and no GPS.

FT8-Derived Sync — Estimates the UTC offset from decoded FT8 signal timing. Offline fallback only: it is automatically ignored while SNTP or GPS is available (those are authoritative), and only nudges the clock when you're off-grid with no better source. See Time Sync.

QMX GPS — Detected automatically, no setting to toggle. If your QMX (typically a QMX+) is GPS-disciplined, the Tab5 recognises it at connect by comparing the QMX's own second-tick against SNTP, and then phase-locks to the GPS second boundary (~10 ms) as an offline time source. On a non-GPS QMX nothing happens. The bottom-bar clock shows UTC(GPS) when a GPS-disciplined QMX is the active source. A clock the Tab5 has itself pushed into the radio is never accepted as evidence of GPS — see Time Sync.

Unit GPS (PORT.A) — not set here. Choose it under Device -> Port mode, since the first question is what is plugged into the connector. When it is on, it beats the QMX's GPS and SNTP while it has a fresh lock, and it is the only offline source that also gives the date. See Unit GPS Time Source.

Display¶

Flip 180° — Invert the display for upside-down mounting or cable routing.

QMX volume — The radio's own AF gain, in decibels: the same number the QMX shows on its own LCD, not a percentage. Available in both Panadapter and FT8 modes. It reads the radio back each time you open the drawer, so if you turn the volume with the rig's own knob the slider follows instead of disagreeing with it. This exists mainly for QMX+ builds with no control panel, where there is no volume knob at all (Randy N4OPI's request). Nothing is sent to the radio until you move the slider, so switching on can never change your volume unexpectedly.

The slider runs 0–50 dB rather than the QMX's full 0–199 dB protocol range, so the useful part of the travel is not crammed into a couple of centimetres. 50 dB is Randy N4OPI's figure from a real radio with the antenna connected — an earlier "not loud enough" reading turned out to have been taken with the antenna off, where the missing loudness was band noise, not gain. If you turn the radio past 50 dB with its own knob the slider knob sits at the end of its travel, but the number still shows the radio's true dB — it has to agree with the LCD.

Two things worth knowing, both from Randy N4OPI's side-by-side check against a real QMX (the numbers do read identically): the QMX only shows the figure on its own LCD when you give its knob a click, and the Tab5 slider reads the radio when the drawer opens — so if you turn the rig's knob while the drawer is on screen, the slider catches up the next time you open it rather than tracking live.

Display sleep — Dropdown (Off / 1 / 2 / 5 / 10 / 30 min). After the chosen idle time the backlight turns off; FT8, the radio link, and the web UI keep running. Tap the screen to wake — the wake tap is swallowed, so it can't tune or press anything. A two-finger double-tap blanks the display immediately.

Brightness — Screen brightness (0–100%).

Frequency format — How a frequency is punctuated, everywhere it is shown: the readout in the top bar, the FT8/FT4 preset button and its band lists, the WSPR band picker, the frequency keypad and the scale under the spectrum.

The default, 14.074.000, is what the Tab5 has always shown and what the QMX shows on its own LCD. It is not a national convention — Icom, Yaesu and Kenwood group a frequency the same way, using the periods as visual anchors between MHz, kHz and Hz rather than as a decimal point. Matching the radio sitting next to the Tab5 is why it is the default.

The alternative, 14,074,000, is US written grammar: a comma every three digits (Don N2VGU, who reads and writes frequencies that way and whose instruments offer the choice). It changes as soon as you pick it — there is nothing to restart.

Spectrum Mode — - Normal — absolute dBm scale - Flat — relative to per-bin noise floor (signals pop above baseline)

Port mode (PORT.A)¶

Advanced -> Device. One connector, two possible owners, so there is one setting with two values:

Relay (default) — the remote power-cycle relay drives GPIO53/54, exactly as it always has. A board that has never seen this setting is on Relay, so nothing changes when you update.
Unit GPS v1.1 — the M5Stack Unit GPS owns those pins as a UART instead, and disciplines the clock from the satellite: time and the full date, with no internet. See Unit GPS Time Source.

Switching is live — the pins are handed straight over, and a toast confirms which side has PORT.A. It is refused while a relay pulse or power cycle is running (finish it first), and refused if the GPS UART cannot be brought up (the mode then stays as it was, rather than changing to something that is not working).

!!! warning "Never leave the Unit GPS plugged in while Port mode is Relay"

Relay mode **drives both pins**. The Unit GPS transmits on one of them.
They are mutually exclusive by hardware: either plug the GPS in and select
*Unit GPS v1.1*, or unplug it and stay on *Relay*. The warning is shown
right under the control, and the bottom-bar GPS indicator is hidden entirely
while Relay owns the port.

Tip: switch the mode first, then plug the GPS in. The reverse order works but puts the GPS's transmitter against a driven pin for the moment between the two.

The same control is in the web UI's Miscellaneous menu, above the remote relay row — the relay row greys out and says why whenever Unit GPS owns PORT.A. See Web UI.

Battery Care¶

Charge Limit — Optionally stop charging once the battery reaches a set percentage (default 80%), to reduce long-term wear on the pack. Enable it and choose the target in the settings drawer; charging restarts automatically if the level later falls well below the target (5% hysteresis). Leave it off to always charge to 100%.

Accurate charge reading while charging — the displayed battery percentage (and the charge-limit trigger) now compensate for the voltage rise that occurs while charging current is flowing. Previously this made the reading jump around while plugged in, and made the charge limit either stick just short of the target or oscillate; both are fixed.

"(limit)" on the battery reading (v1.9.4) — once the cap trips, the battery text on both the Tab5 and the web UI grows a (limit) suffix. Without it, "capped on purpose at 80%" and "not charging for some other reason" looked identical.

Waterfall Controls¶

Black Level (dB) — How far above noise floor to show as black (default 9 dB). Lower = more colour detail.

Contrast (dB) — Span of the colour ramp (default 45 dB). Lower = more contrast, higher = more gradation.

FFT Window — - Blackman-Harris (default) — best frequency resolution - Hann — smoother peaks - Nuttall — sharpest edges

Waterfall rate — in rows per second, default 10. The steps are 1 to 10, then 20, 30 and 40. Before v1.16.12 this was a 1× to 4× multiplier over a fixed 10 rows/s, which could only go faster; slower is what was actually wanted, both to put more history on one screen and to cut the waterfall's share of the drawing work. The spectrum and S-meter update rate is unchanged either way.

The same control is in the browser, and the two lists match.

Spur suppression — withdrawn in v1.8.9. The control is no longer in the drawer.

At some dial frequencies the QMX puts a comb of evenly spaced artifacts into the spectrum, and this setting was meant to remove them. It only ever worked at zoom ×1: above that the display is drawn from a second, finer analysis that the suppression never reached, so turning it on or off made no difference at all — and zooming in is exactly what you do when you are looking at a spur.

It also matters less than the original measurements suggested. Those were taken with the antenna disconnected, where the strongest tooth stood nearly 40 dB above the noise. With a real antenna on the same radio it measures about 23 dB, because band noise rises and buries the weaker teeth.

Nothing is lost by its absence, and the work is kept for a future release.

Wherever something is being removed, the thin line under the frequency labels turns teal. You can always see what is being touched.

!!! note "The 25 Hz nudge is real"

Learning a frequency briefly moves the radio 25 Hz and puts it back. You may
hear it on CW. It happens once per frequency, about two seconds after you stop
tuning, and not at all on a frequency already learned. This is why the feature
is off by default.

Panadapter & Zoom¶

Still spectrum (Radio & display, on by default) — the spectrum and waterfall hold still and the VFO marker moves across them, so a signal stays where you last saw it while you tune towards it. Switch it off and the display re-centres on the dial at every step with the marker in the middle. Applies from ×2 zoom up; at ×1 the view is already the whole 48 kHz the radio sends, so there is no room to hold it still. The full behaviour, including when the view re-frames, is in Panadapter -> Still Spectrum.

Tune snap (Advanced) — the grid a tap on the spectrum lands on, in SSB and the digital modes: Off, 250 Hz, 500 Hz or 1 kHz. The default is 500 Hz, which is what earlier versions always did.

Choose Off to tune exactly where you tap (asked for by Samuel W7STF). The grid exists because SSB stations sit on whole kilohertz and the ones that stray are usually at the half, so landing on a round number is normally what you want — but it is a preference, and now it is one you can set. CW keeps its own 10 Hz grid, AM its 1 kHz, and tap-to-RIT overrides all of them, because an offset onto one caller's tone needs resolution rather than tidiness.

Distance in Miles — show distances in miles instead of kilometres, in the FT8 decode list and on the WSPR page (off by default). Until v1.12.0 the WSPR list and its Best DX panel always printed kilometres regardless of this setting, and the control was not reachable from the WSPR page at all.

Band-plan region — Sets which region's band plan drives the coloured CW/Digi/Phone strip along the bottom of the screen. Auto derives it from your grid square; you can also force Region 1/2/3.

Band Presets — Add or remove custom bands. Standard bands (160–10 m) are always available.

Bluetooth mouse and keyboard¶

A Bluetooth mouse is the one pointer that works while the QMX is plugged in. A USB mouse cannot: the radio occupies the Tab5's only USB host, and sharing it through a hub does not work on this hardware — both devices end up disabled. A Bluetooth mouse never touches that port, so the radio keeps its connection.

For anyone operating with cold or unsteady hands, that is the point: every menu, button and drawer control becomes a click instead of a precise tap on glass.

!!! warning "The mouse must be Bluetooth 4.0 or later" Only Bluetooth Low Energy mice work. The Tab5 gets its Bluetooth from a co-processor that has no Bluetooth Classic radio in it at all, so an older Classic mouse cannot be made to work by any firmware change.

Most mice sold since about 2014 are Low Energy. Look for **Bluetooth 4.0** or
later on the box. A dual-mode mouse works on its Low Energy channel.

**How to tell which problem you have.** A Classic mouse never appears to the
Tab5 at all — the Bluetooth symbol keeps looking and never turns blue, because
the Tab5 listens only for mice that announce themselves the Low Energy way. A
mouse that *does* connect but moves the pointer oddly is a different matter,
and that one is worth reporting.

Setting it up

Tick Bluetooth mouse -> Enable in the settings drawer.
Restart the Tab5. Bluetooth can only start once the radio link to the wireless co-processor is up, so the switch takes effect on the next boot — the toast says so at the time.
Put the mouse into pairing mode and wait a few seconds. It connects on its own.

You only do this once. The pairing is stored, survives a reboot and a firmware update, and the mouse reconnects by itself from then on.

The Bluetooth symbol in the bottom bar sits just left of the WiFi indicator and has three states:

Symbol	Meaning
Dim grey	Bluetooth is switched off
Pale	On and looking for a device
Blue	A mouse or keyboard is ready to use

What works: moving the pointer, left click, and the scroll wheel — the wheel scrolls whatever is under the pointer, so the decode list, the settings drawer and the manual all scroll.

!!! note "The pointer disappears when the mouse sleeps" A Bluetooth mouse switches itself off after about half a minute of not being moved, to save its battery. The pointer vanishes with it and comes back the instant you touch the mouse — reconnecting takes under a third of a second. This is the mouse looking after its own battery, not a fault.

A Bluetooth keyboard¶

A Bluetooth keyboard works the same way and needs no separate setting — the same Bluetooth -> Enable switch covers both. Pair it and it types into every text field, exactly as the snap-on keyboard does: Enter presses Save in any window, Esc presses Cancel, Tab moves to the next field, and the arrow keys move the cursor.

A keyboard and a mouse can be connected at the same time, in either order.

The on-screen keyboard steps aside whenever a Bluetooth keyboard is connected. That is most of the reason to have one: the on-screen keyboard covers a large part of the display, and with a real keyboard you get that space back.

!!! warning "US keyboard layout only for now" A Bluetooth keyboard sends key positions rather than characters, and the Tab5 currently reads them through a US layout. Letters, digits, Enter, Tab, Esc and the arrow keys are the same on every layout, so typing a callsign, a grid, a frequency or a password works on any keyboard. Some punctuation on a non-US layout will produce a different character. National layouts are planned.

!!! note "A sleeping keyboard costs you nothing" Like the mouse, a Bluetooth keyboard switches itself off when idle. Pressing any key wakes it, and reconnecting takes a few seconds — but anything you type while it is waking up is held and delivered once the link is back, so you do not lose the first characters.

Firmware updates¶

!!! warning "The next update after v1.14.4 needs a USB-C cable, once"

v1.14.4 is the last release that installs over the air for a while. The one
after it claims 2.81 MB of flash that no partition has ever used, which
means rewriting the partition table — and an over-the-air update can only
ever write the app, never the map of the flash. That is deliberate: it is
what stops a failed download taking the layout with it.

So the next firmware arrives as a **flasher download** — the same USB-C data
cable and the same `flash.bat` / `flash.command` you used the first time.
One time, and everything after it is over the air again.

**Your settings and your log are kept.** Press **Enter** at the flash-type
prompt. Do *not* press **E** — that erases the whole chip, including your
QSO log and your LoTW private key, and it is not needed here.

The Tab5 will tell you when the time comes: the update window says so
instead of offering a download, and it refuses to fetch an image it cannot
install.

Updating is one route, and you are always asked (v1.14.4) — when a newer release appears, the version at the bottom of the screen changes to show it. Tap it, and a window opens with Download now. The download runs in the background, and when it finishes the same window offers Restart now.

Nothing is fetched and nothing is installed until you press something. The earlier "download updates in the background" option is gone: it had been suppressed by a memory guard for months and never actually ran, so removing it made the behaviour match what it had always been in practice.

⚠ Applying an update Keeping It Up To Date.

Live Spots¶

Draws other stations on the spectrum at the frequency they are operating on. Full details, including what the colours mean, in Live Spots.

Live spots (POTA) — On by default. Fetches Parks On The Air activations about once a minute and draws them over the spectrum. Needs WiFi. Switching it off leaves the spectrum completely clean.

RBN spots (CW skimmers) — Off by default, and deliberately so: RBN is a continuous global feed over a persistent connection, unlike POTA's occasional fetch. Adds stations the skimmer network is hearing right now, filtered to the band you are on. Requires your callsign to be set (the feed asks for one on connect — it identifies you, it is not a password).

DX cluster spots (phone) — Off by default, same reasoning: a second persistent connection. This is the source that carries SSB. Skimmers are machines, and no machine recognises a callsign spoken into a microphone, so phone activity is structurally invisible to RBN however long you leave it on. A cluster is people typing, so it carries voice contacts, and park and summit references written into the comment. Mode is worked out from the spotter's comment, or from your band plan when the comment does not say. Relayed skimmer spots are dropped, so the cluster cannot double what RBN is already showing.

Whatever you switch on, one station is one entry: the same callsign within 2 kHz is merged, an activation spot outranks a plain sighting, and a dropped duplicate folds back in as corroboration — drawn brighter, meaning a receiver copied them just now rather than someone having typed it an hour ago.

Spot Map¶

There is no setting here any more — the full-screen map of stations that have reported your signal runs its feeds from boot, always, and opens from the SelfSpotter button in the drawer (below Need guidance?), not a setting or a switch. Full details in Spot Map, including what running the feeds all the time costs.

Wants your grid square (the map draws lines from it) and your callsign (it is what the feeds are asked about). QRZ callbook credentials are optional and only place RBN skimmers more precisely.

FT8 Settings¶

FT8 On/Off — Globally enable/disable FT8 mode.

Field Day Mode — ARRL Field Day mode (on/off, class, section).

Simulation Mode — Practice QSOs with six phantom stations — no QMX needed at all, radio never keyed (red breathing border on screen). See FT8 Transmit.

Fast pounce (early decode) — On by default. Decodes surface ~1.8 s before the slot boundary (WSJT-X style), so a fresh CQ can be answered in the very next slot and mid-QSO replies land on the beat. Trade-off: the capture window closes early, so a station transmitting late in the slot can occasionally be missed. ⚠️ Not yet A/B-verified on a live band — if your decodes-per-slot drop with it on, turn it off and please report your numbers.

!!! tip "v1.16.4 made this actually deliver"

Starting the decode early only helps if the *decision* to transmit is taken
early too, and until v1.16.4 only one of the Tab5's two processors was
allowed to take it. Which one happened to find the station calling you was
chance — so the same situation answered immediately about half the time and
a full cycle (30 s) late the rest, which is exactly how it looked from the
operator's chair *(Gyula HA3HZ: "sometimes it works well, other times the
transmission is delayed")*. Both halves may now decide. Verified on the air
over three contacts, every message going out in the immediate slot.

Distance in miles — Show the decode list's distance column in miles instead of kilometres.

Report to PSK Reporter — On by default. Uploads the stations you decode to PSK Reporter, the same as WSJT-X, so you appear on the map as a monitoring station and other operators can see where they were heard.

What is sent, over the internet only and never on the air: your callsign and grid square, and for each station you decode their callsign, their grid (if their message contained one), the frequency, the signal report and the mode. Reports are batched and sent at most once every five minutes.

It does nothing at all until both your callsign and grid are set, and it is disabled outright in Simulation Mode, so practice contacts can never reach the public map. Uncheck this box to switch it off entirely.

The first report goes out 5–5½ minutes after switching on, so nothing appears immediately. To check it is working, look for QMX Panadapter under "Software in use" at pskreporter.info/cgi-bin/pskstats.pl.

FT8 Filters — Include/exclude stations, set auto-reply priority, enable robot mode, grey-listing (see FT8 Receive for details).

Keyboard — M5Stack Tab5 snap-on keyboard support (if connected). See The snap-on keyboard below for everything it can do.

WSPR¶

The WSPR group appears only while the WSPR page is up, and holds Allow transmitting, Declared power, Transmit schedule, Band hopping and Publish spots to wsprnet. They are described where they make sense — see WSPR.

The snap-on keyboard¶

If the M5Stack Tab5 70-key snap-on keyboard is attached it is detected and needs no configuration. It does considerably more than fill in text fields.

Snap it on any time (v1.9.4) — attaching it after boot works too, found and ready to type within a couple of seconds; the same is true of taking it off and reattaching mid-session. Its two LEDs are deliberately dark once it's found - the keyboard works identically regardless of when it was attached, so there's nothing left for a light to usefully distinguish.

Typing. Any window with text fields takes the keyboard directly — WiFi setup, your callsign and grid, CQ messages, FT8 filters, memory channels. Tab moves between fields, Enter saves and Escape cancels.

Getting around.

Key	Does
Arrows	Scroll the settings drawer and the manual. Press repeatedly and it scrolls further each time
Page Up / Page Down	Move a whole screen
Enter	The confirming button of whatever is open — Save, Transmit, Yes
Escape	Closes whatever is in front of you, including the settings drawer and the memory page

Shortcuts. Hold Ctrl and press a letter:


Ctrl+R Radio menus	Ctrl+M User manual	Ctrl+H Need guidance?	Ctrl+L QSO log
Ctrl+K Memory channels	Ctrl+P Panadapter	Ctrl+F FT8	Ctrl+S Settings drawer
Ctrl+D Display off

Any key wakes the display again afterwards.

Changing them. The web page has a shortcuts editor — Miscellaneous ▸ Keyboard shortcuts. There are 25 actions to choose from, including zoom, brightness, releasing the radio to its own front panel, and every setup window. Alt is left completely unused so you can put your own bindings there without disturbing anything. See The web interface.

!!! note "Nothing that transmits can be given a shortcut" Deliberately. A button you deliberately press is one thing; a two-key combination that a slipped finger can produce is another. Calling CQ, transmitting and tuning stay where you can see them.

This keyboard has no Shift and no Fn key — Sym and Aa are handled inside the keyboard itself, so Ctrl and Alt are what shortcuts can use.

Audio & DSP¶

IQ Balance — Adaptive I/Q phase correction (usually on). Suppresses mirror-image signals.

Diagnostic Logging¶

The diagnostic log is always on — there is nothing to enable. All firmware log output is captured to a 5 MB memory ring, with a rolling copy persisted to internal flash (survives a reboot or power-off) and, if a microSD card is inserted, mirrored to the card as well (see microSD Auto-Archive for when the card copy is written — the flash copy is always complete). Download via:

Web UI: open the Files menu in the bottom bar and click Diagnostic download ↓ (downloads both the live session log and the flash-persisted copy from before the last reboot)
microSD card: /qmx-panadapter/qmx-log.txt
USB serial: tools/capture_serial_log.ps1

Useful for troubleshooting rare issues.

microSD Auto-Archive — Station Backup¶

Insert a microSD card (FAT32 or exFAT, any size — a plain 32 GB FAT32 card is ideal) and it automatically mirrors your whole station to /qmx-panadapter/ on the card. It's a grab-and-go backup: pull the card into a PC (or another Tab5) to back up or move your setup — no computer needed in the field.

File	Contents
`qso.adi`	ADIF QSO log — after each new entry with WiFi off, otherwise at the next start-up
`qso.prev.adi`	The QSO log as it was just before it last got smaller — see below
`qmx-config.txt`	All settings + memory channels, as INI text (restore via Config upload)
`lotw_cert.b64`, `lotw_key.b64`	Your LoTW signing certificate + private key, so a restored device can sign for LoTW
`qmx-log.txt` (+`.1`)	Diagnostic log, rolling (rotated at 5 MB)
`README.txt`	A plain-text description of every file, written on each mount

After inserting the SD card your Tab5 needs a restart. The Tab5 can only claim the card during a short window early in boot, so a card pushed in while it is running is not used until you restart.

Benefits of a microSD card¶

The Tab5 works perfectly well without one. With a card in, you also get:

A full diagnostic history instead of the last few minutes. Without a card, the log that survives a restart is held in a small area of internal flash and is overwritten roughly every 11 minutes of busy operating. On the card it is kept whole — so if something goes wrong overnight, or an hour ago, the evidence is still there when you come to report it.
A grab-and-go station backup. Your QSO log, every setting, your WiFi details and your LoTW certificate and key, mirrored automatically. Move the card to another Tab5 and your station comes with it, with no computer involved.
A safety net for the QSO log. The copy from just before the log last got smaller is kept beside it as qso.prev.adi, so a deletion you only notice two restarts later is still recoverable.
Somewhere to put things. Browse, download, upload and delete everything on the card from any computer at http://qmx.local/files — without pulling it out.

A plain 32 GB FAT32 card is ideal. There is no benefit to a fast or expensive one: the Tab5 writes a few kilobytes a minute.

After inserting the SD card your Tab5 needs a restart.

When the mirror runs¶

The microSD card and the WiFi co-processor share a bus on this hardware and cannot both use it reliably. Rather than fail at an unpredictable moment, the Tab5 picks the behaviour that works:

	What happens
WiFi off (POTA/SOTA)	Continuous mirroring the whole time the card is in
WiFi on	One complete backup within a few seconds of switching on, then file mirroring stops — but the diagnostic log and the CW transcript keep going, every 30 seconds

Either way your QSO log, config, and LoTW certificate and key are backed up. With WiFi on, QSOs made later in that session reach the card at the next start-up — so if you have been operating with WiFi up and want them on the card now, restart the Tab5.

What the SD dot means (changed in v1.16.3)¶

The dot reports whether writes are actually landing, not merely whether a card mounted:

Dot	Meaning
Green	A write succeeded in the last 90 seconds
Yellow	A card is mounted, but nothing has been written lately
Grey, struck through	No card in the slot — not an error

Before v1.16.3 the dot went yellow about ten seconds into any WiFi session and stayed yellow for the rest of it, whatever the card was doing — so it read the same on a perfectly healthy unit and on one where every write was failing. It now distinguishes those.

A short spell of yellow is not a fault: on a quiet session there may be nothing to write. Yellow that persists while the Tab5 is clearly busy means writes are failing — see Troubleshooting.

While a browser is watching the spectrum, those 30-second writes wait. The card and the WiFi co-processor share a bus, and writing the card holds the spectrum stream for several seconds — long enough to look like the web page has frozen. The writes go through regardless after three minutes, so a crash still reaches the card; close the browser tab if you want the card fully current sooner.

⚠️ The card holds credentials. A full backup that can restore a station necessarily includes secrets: qmx-config.txt stores your WiFi password and QRZ/eQSL logins in clear text, and lotw_key.b64 is your LoTW private key. Keep the card as physically secure as a house key. (The on-card README.txt repeats this warning.)

The diagnostic log is always-on regardless of whether an SD card is present. If no card is inserted, the log still persists to internal flash (see Diagnostic Logging above) and survives a power-off.

Taking the card out, and restarting the Tab5¶

Two buttons in the settings drawer:

Eject microSD finishes whatever is being written, closes the card and tells you when it is safe to pull it out. The confirmation stays on screen until you close it, so you can look at the card slot without missing it. Pulling the card without ejecting risks losing the last thing written to it.
Restart the Tab5 reboots cleanly from the screen instead of the power button. The card is released first.
Power off the Tab5 (from v1.20.1) shuts the unit down from the screen, directly under Restart. It is in the Advanced section, not Basic, because unlike Restart it does not come back. It asks twice: the first tap changes the button to Tap again to power off.

This is a real shutdown, not a sleep, and it holds with 5 V still present on the USB-C input - measured, because that is how a Tab5 powered from the radio's own battery pack is wired (Randy N4OPI, whose QMX+ is headless and who had already lost a set of 18650s to undervoltage).

The radio is put back into receive first. The robot is stood down, transmit is disarmed, TA0; then RX; go to the radio, and settings are flushed - so a transmission in progress cannot be left keyed by shutting the Tab5 down. The same control is in the browser, under Miscellaneous.

⚠ The power button on the case cuts power in hardware. No firmware runs, so none of the above happens. Use the screen button if the radio might be transmitting.

The card is now also released automatically before a firmware update. Before v1.16.11 a reset caught the card mid-transaction, and because the Tab5 cannot power the card down on its own the card stayed confused until the whole unit was powered off - which is why a card could take several attempts to mount after an update, or not come back at all.

Restoring the log from the card¶

The card copy used to be one-way: the Tab5 wrote qso.adi to it and could never read it back, so a log lost to an erase-and-reinstall needed a computer, a browser, and knowing the file was on the card at all. It now restores from the device itself.

On the Tab5: open the log window (ADIF Log) and press Restore from SD.
In the browser: QSO Logs ▲ -> ↳ Restore from SD card.

Both merge: contacts already in the log are skipped, nothing is duplicated, and nothing already logged is lost — so it is safe to press twice. You are told what happened, including how many were already there and how many could not be read.

qso.prev.adi — the copy from before. The card mirrors the present, so a QSO deleted before a restart is gone from the card at the next start-up too. Whenever the log about to be written is smaller than the one already on the card, the older copy is kept as qso.prev.adi first. Normal logging grows the file and never disturbs it, so it holds the last larger version for as long as it takes you to notice.

To use it, copy qso.prev.adi off the card (Files ▲ -> SD Files in the browser, or a card reader) and restore it with ADIF restore ↑.

Activation (POTA / SOTA)¶

When you are activating a park or a summit, every contact you make has to be logged as belonging to that reference — it is what POTA and SOTA read to credit the activation, for you and for the people who worked you.

Open Activation (POTA/SOTA) in the settings drawer, pick the scheme, type the reference, and tap Start activation. From then on every logged QSO carries it automatically. There is nothing to remember per contact.

The screen shows your contact count against the threshold — ten for POTA, four for SOTA — and turns green when you reach it. That number is read from the log itself, so it survives a reboot and can never disagree with what was actually written.

Stopping matters as much as starting. While a session is running the main button is a red Stop activation, and the drawer button itself shows the live reference rather than a generic label. The failure that actually happens is driving home with it still switched on, quietly stamping every later contact with a park you have left.

The session persists across a restart on purpose — a battery change in the field should not lose it — but it is deliberately not included in a config backup, so restoring an old backup can never re-activate a park you are nowhere near.

Chasing works without any setup: if you work a station the panadapter has seen spotted at a park or summit, that reference is written into your log entry automatically.

Uploading just one activation: the web UI's ADIF download can be limited to a single reference, so you get that park's log rather than your entire file.

SWR protection¶

While transmitting, the QMX reports its SWR back over the control link. If the reading reaches the limit you set here the transmitter is latched off — nothing will transmit again until you clear it by tapping the red warning on the FT8 screen.

Choose Off, 2.0:1, 2.5:1, 3.0:1 or 4.0:1. The default is 3.0:1.

This is one station-wide setting and one latch. A bad antenna is a fact about your station, not about the mode you happened to be using, so a trip in WSPR stops FT8 as well and the other way round.

In FT8 the burst is cut short; the SWR is sampled part-way through and the transmission stops there. In WSPR the burst is cut short too, from v1.19.0: the SWR is sampled every few seconds through the transmission and a burst that goes bad is stopped where it stands rather than running its full 110 seconds, and the next one is refused the moment you arm it. In FT4 the check happens after the burst, so the one burst completes and every later one is blocked. That is not an oversight: FT4 symbols are 48 ms and a control-link query takes about 50 ms, so asking mid-burst would disturb the transmission it is trying to protect. A reading is only acted on if there is real power behind it — the radio can report a meaningless ratio when the amplifier is not actually loaded. That is high enough not to trip on a merely mediocre match, and low enough to stop a burst going into a disconnected antenna, a wrong-band antenna or a damaged feedline — which is how this usually goes wrong in the field. An FT8 transmission is nearly thirteen seconds of continuous key-down, so there is real time to save.

The latch is deliberately sticky. A bad antenna does not repair itself, and resuming automatically would simply transmit into the same fault on the next slot.

!!! note "Set it to Off if you use a tuner" With a matched antenna the protection never fires, but if you are deliberately loading something unusual you may prefer no interference at all.

Who has heard me (last 24 h)¶

This asks PSK Reporter which receivers have copied your callsign recently. It is the reverse of the reports the panadapter sends, and the two are separate settings — you can have either without the other.

It answers a question no amount of local processing can: am I actually getting out? The valuable case is the mismatch. Stations you can hear that cannot hear you is a transmit-side problem — antenna, power, a bad connector — and from the receiving side alone it looks exactly like a dead band.

This one lives in the browser, not on the Tab5. There is no drawer control for it — the answer is a list of stations with distances and bearings, which wants a screen you are already sitting in front of. In the web UI open Settings -> Spots & reporting and tick Who has heard me (last 24 h), then Miscellaneous -> Who has heard me (24 h) for the list: receiver, country, distance, bearing and the signal report they gave you, sorted by distance.

It is read-only and asks at most once every five minutes, which is the rate PSK Reporter requests.

!!! note "An empty list is the normal answer if you have not transmitted" Nobody can report hearing you until you have been on the air. Give it a few minutes after a CQ run.

ADIF & Logging¶

ADIF Log — View the QSO log on-device. The viewer shows a proper column table:

Column	Content
Call	Callsign
Grid	Their Maidenhead grid square, when they sent one
Country	DXCC entity (looked up from the callsign prefix)
Mode	FT8 or FT4
Band	Band (20m, 40m, …)
Date	UTC date
Time	UTC time
Sent	Your signal report (SNR)
Rcvd	Their signal report (SNR)
Ref	The park or summit they were activating, when the contact came from a spot

A sticky header row stays pinned while you scroll. Even-numbered rows are lightly shaded so long logs stay easy to scan.

Search — the field under the title filters the list as you type. It matches callsign, country, mode, band, date, grid and the park/summit reference, on any part of a word, and several words must all match: ha3 20m finds HA3-prefix contacts on 20 m only. Country is searchable even though the ADIF file does not store it — it comes from the same prefix lookup the Country column shows, so the two can never disagree.

If nothing matches, the list says so in as many words: "Nothing matches X — so this one has not been worked." That is the question the search exists to answer. The decode list already greys out a station you have worked, but only while that station happens to be on the air; this asks the same question whenever you like (Gyula HA3HZ).

Tapping the field brings up the keyboard, and the window moves up and shortens so the matches stay visible while you type. Clear the field to see the whole log again; the search also clears itself each time you open the window.

Today/All filter — the viewer opens on Today (falling back to All when nothing was logged today). The toggle button shows the view you switch to by pressing it; the title shows the current view with counts.

POTA activation counter — in the Today view the title reads "Today: N (M total)" and turns green once today reaches 10 QSOs — a valid POTA activation.

Delete a single record — long-press a QSO row: the row highlights red and list scrolling locks. Drag up/down to move the highlight, then release — a Delete/Cancel bar appears at the bottom. Delete removes just that one record (useful for duplicates).

Restore from SD — the middle button reads the QSO log back off the microSD card. See Restoring the log from the card below; there is nothing to choose, and contacts already logged are skipped, so pressing it twice does nothing.

Delete all — the red-bordered button at the bottom-left erases the whole log. Two-tap confirm: the first tap arms it (the label changes to "ALL N?"), a second tap within 5 seconds deletes; wait and it disarms itself. There is no undo — download the ADIF from the web UI first if you want a copy. Handy before a POTA activation: start with an empty log and the ADIF at the end is exactly the file you submit.

Anything this window does — a restore, a delete — reports back in a small panel with an OK button rather than a message that fades on its own. The result of something you asked for is worth reading, and dismissing it is how you say you did.

Use the web UI to download the full ADIF file for import into WSJT-X, EQSL, or any other logging software — or view and edit it in the browser (QSO Logs -> View / edit log).

Exclude Worked Before — When FT8 filtering, skip stations you've already logged QSOs with (requires you to import your own prior ADIF log first).

Config Import/Export¶

Config Download — Export all settings + memory channels + ADIF log as a text file (INI format).

Config Upload — Restore settings from a backup file (settings only; memory channels merge).

Use this to: - Back up your settings before a factory reset - Transfer settings to another Tab5 - Recover from accidental changes

Resets — in the browser, not the drawer¶

These two live in the browser, not in the drawer — a reset you can trigger by mistake on a touchscreen in the field is a worse idea than one that needs a computer. Both are in the web UI's Miscellaneous ▲ menu.

Reset settings — Erases the stored settings and memory channels, returning everything to defaults, and reboots. Use if something is stuck in a state you cannot get out of. Take a Config ↓ backup first and you can restore it in seconds.

Reset WiFi — Erases the WiFi credentials and the stored radio/link state. This is the one for a WiFi setup that will not come up no matter what you enter.

Neither of them touches your QSO log. The ADIF log lives in a separate area of flash that is deliberately left alone, so a reset cannot cost you contacts — and neither can a firmware update, which is why a normal flash keeps your log. The only things that erase the log are the Delete all button in the ADIF viewer, the same in the web log viewer, and a clean/erase flash from the flasher.

Next: Troubleshoot an issue via Troubleshooting or explore the API.