Let me introduce myself first. I am Mathieu a 20 year old student in engineering from Belgium. I want to thank you for accepting me on the reflector as I have no radio licence yet.
A few months back I developed a web page to filter out spots from SOTAwatch and get a sound notification when a new spot matching the filtering criteria appears. For those of you that were not aware, you can find the page here: http://www.mathieudavid.org/webapps/sotawatchfilter/#/spotfilter
A few days ago I did a significant update that added a quick way to create a log file as you go. It’s very easy, you can add an entry to the log file by clicking a button next to the spot in the list and it will be added to the list. At the end of the day you just have to download the log file to upload it to the SOTA servers.
Also you are now able to filter out spots from the callsign-summit pairs that you logged. Avoiding notifications for spots you already did.
Hi Mathew,
Tried it out and found it cool.
However, let me explain you that I always like to work an activator when ever it’s possible for me regardless of having contacted that summit before and I think this is the case for most of us. Most of activators and chasers are regularly doing it so we enjoy exchanging greetings and 73s no matter the times.
One think I’d find very nice to have is some colour code for the spotted station/summit text or a coloured background box or something like in the DX cluster:
telling me whether the spotted activation has already been worked/logged and whether the spotted summit has already been worked/logged previously so whether it’s or not a new unique.
This would help chasers to give priority to working an activation over others when several spots raise at about the same time.
Thank you and best 73 de Guru - EA2IF
To clarify, the summits you worked will not be excluded only the callsign & summit combination. Any other callsign on that summit will be shown. But if you want you can find some more options in the settings pane
If you uncheck hide spots, spots that would be hidden by the filter are now shown with a red highlight. This does however include spots hidden by your filter settings and not only logged spots.
I don’t know if this solves the issue? If there is need for a color code to show summits that are already worked, let me know and I will add it to the to-do list
Hi Mathieu, I have been using your web page as my main alert mechanism at home since coming across it a while ago and you explaining how it works. A great tool, that I have as the first tab in my browser.
Thanks for the new features - not sure yet if I will use it or not. Perhaps if I work the South Korea station this morning, I’ll give the logging option a try.
By the way, given how stable the page is, I think you can probably remove the text “beta” from its name now.
[quote=“DD5LP, post:4, topic:10110”]
given how stable the page is, I think you can probably remove the text “beta” from its name now.
[/quote] You are right ! I always forget about that. Thank you for making me notice.
Christophe (ON6ZQ) pointed out to me that I misunderstood what you wanted, my apologies for that. Unfortunately, in order to show you if a summit has already been worked in the past I would need access to your log history and that is not how it works at the moment.
SOTAwatch filter does not require you to link your account or give your credentials to make your log file. You just have to enter your callsign and you are good to go. This makes it very easy to use. On the downside I do not have access to your logging history etc. It’s more of a convenience tool to avoid copy-pasting a lot.
This “logging” brings one more feature, which I personally find very useful: once you have contacted an activator on a given summit and you “log” it, you can choose not to get further audio notifications for his other spots on the same summit when he changes band or mode.
This, in combination with the advanced filtering allowing not to get notifications for stations on another continent when there is no propagation to contact them, makes this tool a real time saver for SOTA chasers.
Dear Mathieu,
First of all excuse me, please, for having changed the spelling of your name in my previous response to you.
Creating the log by just clicking on the log button close to the spot is very helpful as it avoids tedious typing work and prevents for typo errors.
I guess you have seen the software from Alain - F6ENO called Saisie SOTA.
I find it extremely helpful and I’d suggest that the perfect logging feature in your web page SOTA log would be that an .adi file gets created at the same time when uploading the file to SOTA database, so we can later upload the chaser log to our personnal looging program like Logger32 (for me) or any other.
Best 73 de Guru - EA2IF
No problem
The log file is not automatically uploaded from the SOTAwatch filter page to the SOTA database. Because that would require your login credentials. The uploading step is manual. At the end of the day you click the “download log” button and you get a .csv file, with the correct format for the SOTA database, that you can upload to the SOTA servers without modification.
If you need an ADIF formatted log, you can check this tool from Christophe which converts CSV format to ADIF format. It’s not a “one button push” solution, but it is close
