I have waited for a while in order to become accustomed to “Son-of-SOTAwatch” and I am really impressed with the improved facilities. Congratulations Jon, you have done a magnificent job.
However, as an enthusiastic chaser, the “Spots” page is my most important display; it is vital to the success of otherwise of my daily SOTA contacts. This is my “real-time” operational working screen and I would prefer only details of the current activations to be displayed, using the full width of my screen. Any information that is not relevant to the current situation should be available elsewhere.
My preference would be to remove the Reflector details from the spots page; they are already displayed on the Alerts screen, which is fine - this is the page where you can browse through upcoming activations and read through the reflector postings at your leisure.
At the moment the details of the spots take up only about one half of my screen and information is stacked up against the left-hand side. The most critical detail - the callsign of the activator - appears between the SOTA reference and operator comments. I have been missing new calls when three or four were spotted at the same time. If the reflector box was removed this would allow the details to be on a single line.
Using two lines for each spot reduces the number of spots displayed, which varies between 10-12. Last weekend, around noon, there were so many activations that spots less that 30 minutes old were disappearing off the bottom of the screen. As many activators spend more than 30 minutes on a summit it was difficult to know if a spot was a duplicate.
An alternative would be to display the callsign of the activator in red and underline the callsign, not the reference and make the reflector box an option on the spots page.
Roy
G4SSH