Spot Map¶
The Live Spots lane answers "who can I work?". The spot map answers the other question: who is hearing me?
It is a full-screen map of the stations that have reported your signal — the CW skimmer that copied your CQ, the FT8 station whose decode of you reached PSK Reporter, the WSPR receiver that logged your beacon — each drawn as a line from your grid square to theirs.
This is Uwe DL8UG's work, contributed to the project.
!!! note "Always on, no setting to find" The three feeds below connect from the moment the Tab5 boots and stay connected — there is nothing to switch on. Earlier versions asked you to enable it first and only ran the feeds while the map was open; both of those were tried and dropped, in that order, on the operator's own instruction, once he found the list was still empty the first few minutes after opening it either way. See What it costs, running all the time.
1. Opening it¶
Open the settings drawer and tap SelfSpotter — the button right below
Need guidance?, near the top of the drawer. The map opens over whatever
page you were on, and Exit (top right) closes it. A Bluetooth keyboard's
Esc closes it too.
!!! note "Not a swipe any more" Earlier versions opened this with a swipe down from the top edge of the screen. That gesture collided with the top bar's own Band/Mode/BW/Zoom taps and was easy to trigger by accident, so it was replaced with the drawer button above.
The button works from the panadapter, FT8 and WSPR pages alike — the drawer itself opens the same way from any of them (swipe in from the right edge).
The header shows your callsign, dial frequency, and the current UTC date and time — so a screenshot of the map stands on its own without needing anything else to say when or where it was taken.
There is nothing to switch on first — the feeds have been running since boot (see below), so the map is never starting from a cold, empty world.
2. What feeds it¶
Three sources, all of them reports of your own transmissions:
| Source | Where it comes from | How fresh |
|---|---|---|
| CW (RBN) | A Reverse Beacon Network skimmer copying your CQ | as it happens |
| Digi (PSKR) | PSK Reporter's live feed, over MQTT | as it happens |
| WSPR | wsprnet.org, polled every 3 minutes | trails a cycle |
All three need WiFi. None of them transmits anything — they are lookups of what other people have already published about you.
A report stays on the map for half an hour, then drops off. The map is a picture of who is hearing you now.
The Source checkboxes in the left sidebar show or hide each one. Flush, in the header beside Exit, empties the map immediately so you can start a fresh picture — useful when you change band. It does not stop any of the feeds; they simply begin filling it again. (Contributed by Uwe DL8UG. It was in the sidebar until v1.14.4.)
3. The three tabs¶
MAP draws a line from your position to each station that reported you, over a world map — filled land, lighter than the sea, with a coastline outline on top. Line colour matches the source: blue for CW, amber for digital, green for WSPR. A line older than 30 minutes fades rather than disappearing, so a quiet stretch still shows what was heard recently. Your own position is a dot, drawn on top of everything.
- Drag with one finger to pan.
- Pinch with two fingers to zoom, up to 50×. Zoom is anchored on your own station, so your QTH stays put while the world grows around it.
LIST is the same data as a table — RECEIVER, GRID, COUNTRY, MODE, BAND, FREQUENCY, SNR, KM and AGE — when you want the numbers rather than the picture. Every column is sortable; tap a header to sort by it.
GRID is the locator the receiving station itself sent, not one worked backwards from a position, so it is blank for CW skimmers: they report a callsign and not a location. COUNTRY names the country, which can differ from the DXCC entity the map plots — a Hawaiian station's marker sits on Hawaii, while its country reads United States.
CONDITIONS is HF propagation from hamqsl.com: day and night ratings per band group, plus solar flux, A and K index, sunspot number, geomagnetic field and signal noise. It refreshes about hourly, which is as often as the source updates.
4. What you must set first¶
Your grid square. The map draws lines from you, so without it there is nothing to draw from — the sidebar says so in red, and the map stays empty. Set it in Settings -> Station -> Callsign & Grid square.
Your callsign, for the same reason: it is what the three feeds are asked about.
QRZ.com callbook credentials are optional. RBN reports name the skimmer that heard you, not where it is, so the map looks that up on QRZ to place it. Without credentials an RBN line still gets drawn, using the centre of the skimmer's DXCC entity — right country, wrong town. PSK Reporter and WSPR carry a grid square in the report itself and never need the lookup.
These are set in the web UI, not on the Tab5 — open http://<tab5-ip> in a
browser and use Miscellaneous -> Set QRZ Callbook login. They are your QRZ.com
username and password for the Callsign Lookup service, which is a different thing
from the QRZ Logbook API key used for uploading contacts.
5. What it costs, running all the time¶
Worth knowing, since there is no longer a setting to weigh this against:
It holds a connection on your behalf, permanently. From boot, the Tab5 holds a live session to PSK Reporter's broker subscribed to your callsign, and polls RBN and wsprnet. That used to be something you asked for first; now it starts with everything else.
It costs memory that other things need. Measured on the bench, running the feeds costs about 6.6 KB of internal RAM and 2.6 KB of the DMA pool — and that DMA pool is the one that microSD mounts, USB and encrypted uploads draw on when they need it. Every unit pays this now, whether or not the map is ever opened.
The feeds run whether the map is on screen or not — opening it doesn't start them and closing it doesn't stop them — so the picture is already populated with whatever has come in since boot the first time you look, rather than starting from nothing.
6. If the map stays empty¶
Nobody has heard you yet. The commonest answer, and not a fault: the map only fills once you have actually transmitted and somebody has reported it. Call CQ, or let WSPR or FT8 run for a few cycles, then look again.
No grid square set — the sidebar says so in red. See section 4.
WiFi is down. All three feeds need it.
Only some sources are ticked. Check the Source boxes in the sidebar.
You are running CW but RBN spots are absent — a skimmer has to actually copy you. RBN coverage is thinner on some bands and at some hours than others.