Updates to SOTAWatch3

I’ve just pushed a bunch of new features to SOTAWatch3 in response to some user requests and also some tidying up of the UI.

Firstly, I’ve moved a bunch of settings into a global settings form that can be accessed from the login menu:
image

All the normal alerts/spots values are there, and can also still be accessed from each tab, and will stay in synch between them. Set a filter on Alerts in the Global form, hit submit, and you’ll see it available on the Alerts tab.

The layout option that sat in the Spots tab to toggle the alignment from centre-aligned to left aligned is now a global option and removed form the Spots tab.

The two new features that have been added that required a global settings form in the first place is firstly the addition of themes - in particular a dark theme - and secondly, the addition of audio notifications.

There are now three themes to choose from. The first or Normal theme is the SW3 theme you know and love. The second is called “Dark” and looks something like this:

The third one is called “Flat” and is a light version of the new dark theme, but quite similar to the Normal theme:

Both new themes borrow heavily from the Flatly and Darkly themes from Bootswatch, for those who care (and maybe are wondering about the names).

The Audio notifications are disabled by default, so you will need to select an option from the Settings form to try these out. They are simply text-to-speech dialogs saying “There’s a spot on SOTAWatch”. I have provided male and female voices in British and US English. If people send me translations of the phrase, I’ll add in other nationalities. I’ve leant on my own poor Japanese knowledge to include two Japanese options too.

If people want other notifications, I’m open to providing them, although I don’t want a dropdown list of 700 options. Any file you provide me to include must be public domain (and yes, I struggled to find a simple, short, clearly marked PD goat bleat earlier today).

You may find that you do not hear the notifications if your browser disables auto-play. You can click just to the left to the URL and this will display the permissions available - simply allow Audio.

17 Likes

Very cool indeed. Love the Dark theme.

Thanks!

Paul

2 Likes

Maybe it is what you want or maybe it is a bug, but if you return to the settings popup. Some of the values return to the defaults rather than what you previously set. I noticed this as I switched between English and Japanese as I asked my daughter to tell me what was being said.

In the Alerts settings if you selected “All modes” it returns to blank, which may well have caused the issue for Phil G4OBK

Fantastic work.

Any chance in the future when adding an alert, in the summit reference - to be able to search for the summit rather than having to have the reference handy when adding the alert?

W

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The main reason I haven’t done this on either form is to do with making sure it all still works when network connection is a bit flaky - like on a summit somewhere. I’ll add it to the list to look at though.

The most useful part of searching for the reference when adding an alert is there is a possibility that the activator will remember it when activating it and thus we may not see one of those regular posts

“I got the summit reference wrong… I wasn’t on ZL/DI-002 but actually 3Y/BV-001, please update your logs”.

I with Andrew, that I don’t want anything to reduce the usability of SW3 from a phone when I’ve got a less than stellar data connection.

2 Likes

Thanks , very nice appearance now in dark mode!!!

Congrats!

Nice Dark mode! thanks for this . Good Job!

Great job mate especially in dark mode, like the new spot announcements also.

This is now fixed.

The audio notifications might be more useful if the filter on spots allowed to only show certain bands & modes (unless I’m not understanding the filter option).

The spots filter is only by mode, but the audio process occurs after filtering.

Hi Andrew,
Thank you update function. Its really cool!
I like MFA. Its much secure.
Toru K JH0CJH

But you really shouldn’t be adding ALERTS (obviously spots is different) on the summit right? You would go direct to spots?

W

The idea for the Alerts is raising them in advance to make chasers aware of my activating plans. However, I have sometimes improvised a quick activation without previous alert and I raised an alert from my summit right before starting to operate because that way I would be automatically spotted by RBNHole, assuming CW operation, of course.
Cheers,

Guru

1 Like

Excellent idea Guru.
Ron
VK3AFW

IIRC, RBNHole’s predecessor also took cues from spots (or possibly only from self-spots), which had some advantages when it came to (say) correcting a summit referernce, or whatever, but probably made the code rather more complicated, and occasionally led to interesting confusions…

If you’re after more complicated spot filtering you might find the spot filter at SOTAwatch Filter worth a try. The “SOTA Spotter” app (Android only?) also has additional spot filtering options.

1 Like

Today I pushed the following updates to SW3:

  • Spot filtering by band. You can search by HF, VHF or all bands using the dropdown settings panel or the settings form in the menu, similar to the Alerts page.

  • Spot filtering by regular expression. The regex filter box available in the alerts pane is now carried across to the spots pane as well. Search will look at summit reference, callsign or comments for a match. So, you can search for all VK3 activators with “VK3” in the field, or you could search for all ON summits with “ON/” or all summits in the W7A/MN region by (you guessed it) “W7A/MN”. All VK/ZL spots could be searched by “VK|ZL”. You could also search for all APRS2SOTA or RBNHole spots using “\[APRS2SOTA\]” or “RBNHole”. Bonus points for anyone who can regex up an “ignore all TEST” spots regular expression (Google has the answer).

  • Default comments for spots and alerts. You now have the ability to specify a default comment for spots or alerts using the global Settings form from the menu. These will be automatically added to new spots and alerts when you add a spot or alert. These settings are all per-browser, not per-user, so you will need to specify them wherever you wish to use them.

  • Alert time input validation. Times are now checked for validity and formatting before submission as per Alistair @2E0HQS issue from yesterday:
    image

  • Alert date formatting bug. Alert dates were missing a leading zero on days less than the 10th of the month, which is now fixed.

  • Spot depth of 1 week. It is now possible to search back 1 week of spots via the dropdown. Please don’t leave this as your default spot setting - it’s meant to be able to check older spots, rather than being a regular updated thing. As an example, in the past week, over 2000 spots were posted, which will require you to download that data once a minute if you set it up as your default setting.

  • Dutch spot notification voices. Thanks to Peter @ON4UP there’s a Dutch translation of the audio alert on new spot available now.

  • Typeahead for Alert summit. Per Wade @VK1MIC I’ve set this up now to do a one-shot query to the API. In the event that nothing is returned due to poor network, etc, this should return nothing and manual entry should still be possible:

4 Likes

tested and works brilliantly.

Thanks so much

Excellent quick filtering options there! Thanks.

I much prefer the time-based limits to spots over the absolute count options. On a busy weekend 50 seems like too few, while mid-week 20 is too many. :wink: For my usual quick checks, I think an hour and a half, or maybe 2 hours would be perfect, but an hour is close enough. :wink:

Any way the longest ones could be excluded from the possible default options? Sooner or later someone’s going to forget… :confused: