Version 0.3.4: the ShackDeck DX cluster

ShackDeck has a DX cluster of its own. Whatever any station decodes, everyone sees within seconds, in a tab of the program and on a page of the site, live. Only what the programs themselves report, no hand-written spots. A click on a callsign tunes your transceiver, or an online receiver near whoever heard it.

What it is. A classic DX cluster lives on someone noticing a rare station and typing a spot by hand. The ShackDeck cluster fills itself: every program sends the site everything it decoded, within seconds of the decode: the station's callsign and locator, band, mode, frequency, signal level and the receiver it was heard through. Everyone else sees it at once, under the callsign of whoever heard it. No other spots or networks are mixed in: the feed is only what ShackDeck users hear right now.

In the program. A new tab "DX cluster" after "Satellites" (key 6). New rows come in at the top with a glow that fades in a few seconds. One station on one band in one mode within ten minutes is one row: when more stations hear it, the row does not repeat, it grows, with the number of stations and who heard it. Filters: band, mode, the station's continent and country, where it is heard from, the last hour or the last day, "wanted only" (countries and grids new to your log are marked the same way as in the decodes). The "alert on wanted" box sounds when a country or grid new to you shows up in the cluster. A click on a row: if your transceiver is connected, it goes to that frequency and mode; otherwise the online receiver the station was heard through opens, or the nearest one to it with that band. The old "Cluster" view in the logbook is gone.

On the site. The "DX cluster" page in the menu shows the same feed and updates by itself, without reloading. On a phone it shows only the time, the band and the callsign.

Sending is on by default after the program's first-run setup, like the sharing with ShackDeck.com. The switch "Send what I decode to the DX cluster" is in the settings under PSK Reporter; with it off you still see the cluster. Decodes from the online band never go to the cluster: that is not radio. What exactly is sent is written down in the privacy policy.

Also in this version. Contacts made on the online band are marked "Internet" in the logbook instead of a band: they do not count in the totals and are not exported to ADIF or uploaded to the site. The heard-log upload to the site no longer depends on the computer clock: a row is marked unsent until the site takes it, so a wrong clock loses nothing. WSJT-X decodes are logged with the mode name (FT8, FT4, …) rather than its code character. The playback buffer of online receivers grew to four seconds, so the audio breaks less on a poor link.