Connect — map + propagation

Connect is Nexus’s situational-awareness surface: one screen that fuses live spots (PSK Reporter and RBN/DX-cluster) with NOAA space weather, draws them on a map, and reasons about them with an honest opening detector and a native ITU-R P.533 propagation engine. It answers three questions all the time — is the band open, am I getting out, what do I need — and lets you double-click anything on the map to work it.

A design rule runs through the whole section: evidence or it didn’t happen. A band is “open” when stations near you are demonstrably heard both ways, not when one big station far away has a good morning. Modelled data is always labelled “modelled”; the UI never dresses an estimate as a measurement.

The tour

The map

The map renders in three projections:

• a 3-D shaded globe,
• an azimuthal-equidistant beam map (true great-circle headings from your QTH),
• and a flat world view.

The Layers menu toggles what’s drawn on top:

• Greyline with graded civil / nautical / astronomical twilight,
• shaded relief (bundled offline),
• band-heat auras,
• live spot dots — grid-placed, age-faded, and colored by what they’re worth to your log,
• DXpedition markers and range rings,
• modelled MUF and the NOAA aurora oval,
• Satellites (amateur) — mini icons that move in real time (interpolated every second), each with a fading trail behind and a dashed projected path ahead (~25 min); a chased bird renders larger with its footprint ring,
• Proton polar cap (PCA) — violet polar shading that appears only during a real S1+ proton event (on a quiet sun it honestly draws nothing),
• CQ zones — boundary lines and zone numbers (off by default),
• Grid labels — field letters that densify to 4-character squares as you zoom (off by default).

Everything is interactive: hover for a call / entity / band / age / bearing tooltip (bearings read like 312°T (316°M), magnetic from WMM2025), click for a detail rail, and double-click to work — the same atomic QSY path as the rest of the app.

Four intent presets — Chase DX, POTA/SOTA, Ragchew, 6m/VHF — configure the whole surface in one tap.

The pane grid

Around the globe is a HamClock-style assignable pane grid — seven slots (left ×2, right ×2, bottom ×3). Each pane frame has a picker in its corner: click it and choose what that slot shows. A Basic / Expert switch controls density — Basic shows a one-line plain-language projection of each pane, Expert shows the full panel.

The panes you can assign:

Pane	Shows
Conditions	the propagation headline + any warning banners
Band Advisor	every HF band ranked best-first, with plain reasoning
Selection	detail on the station/spot you clicked, with a ▶ Work button
Band Outlook	modelled workable bands to DX (or the path to a selected call)
Openings	detected band openings around you
Space Wx	solar/geomagnetic gauges + the NOAA scales annunciator
Getting Out	who is hearing you right now, on a compass
Best Band → Region	the best band to reach each region
Activity Matrix	a region × band grid of live activity
NCDXF Beacons	the NCDXF beacon schedule, with heard badges
Insights	notable propagation events, narrated
Chase	the “work THIS now” pane — needs fused with band openness
Chase Feed	the ranked chase board (need × openness × rarity × ends-soon)
Greyline	your next greyline window
24h Band×Hour	a band × hour likelihood heatmap
Sporadic-E	live VHF Es openings when present
Measured MUF	real ionosonde MUF measurements
Satellite Passes	next amateur-satellite passes over your grid
Rotor	rotator control + compass (appears once a rotctld is configured)

The default Basic layout puts the conditions reference on the left, the flagship Chase pane and Band Outlook on the right, and a live “now” ticker (Openings, Space Wx, Getting Out) across the bottom.

Core workflows

Assign a pane to a slot

1. Click the picker in any pane frame’s corner.
2. Choose a pane from the list. If that pane already lives in another slot, the two swap — nothing ever vanishes from the grid.
3. Switch Basic / Expert to trade density for a plain-language summary. Your layout and mode persist across sessions.

Read an opening

The opening detector compares a 10-minute window against a 2-hour robust baseline (median + MAD z-scores), anchored to your station, and requires reciprocal paths (heard both ways) before it declares — with anti-flap hysteresis and mode-specific dwell times. When it fires, a rule-ordered classifier labels the mechanism — sporadic-E, F2/TEP, aurora (with skip-hole disambiguation), or tropo — and the right rail shows the band, direction octant, distance, and the participating stations.

Chase what’s workable now

The Chase and Chase Feed panes fuse the Needed board with band openness and timing: they surface the stations that are both needed and heard, scored by need × openness × rarity × time-remaining. Each row has a why-line and a ▶ Work button that QSYs and opens the right cockpit. Basic mode shows the top few; Expert shows the full ranked table.

Track propagation to a specific call

Click a station on the map (or in a pane) and the Selection and Band Outlook panes switch to that call: the modelled path, its MUF ceiling, and per-band workability. With the P.533 engine selected you also get per-mode FT8/FT4/CW/SSB “workable now” chips.

Choose the prediction engine

In Settings ▸ Logging & Connectors, Prediction engine selects Modelled (fast heuristic) or ITU-R P.533 (full physics). P.533 is the real circuit-reliability method (validated against the ITU reference, ~0.1 s per prediction, and it uses your station power and antenna gain). Live spots always win over any model.

The Now-Bar

The persistent Now-Bar carries the Connect intelligence into every section of the app: is the band open, am I getting out, what do I need — with feed-health pills that distinguish “connected but quiet” from “down,” so a silent band never looks like a dead feed.

Honest limits

• The per-path 24-hour outlook is a physics-lite in-house heuristic (MUF + D-layer) and is labelled “modelled.” The P.533 engine is a fuller model but is still a model; live spots override both.
• VOACAP is not integrated.
• PSK Reporter’s MQTT band topics carry no SNR, so SNR-derived features degrade gracefully where the data isn’t present.
• The “getting out” inference is disabled on VHF, where sporadic-E patch disjointness makes a region-reach claim invalid.

Related guides

• Needed — DX that’s on the air now
• Spots — the same cluster/RBN traffic as a table, unranked
• APRS — the other map in the app, plotting the packet stations your own receiver decodes
• Satellites
• DXpeditions
• Settings reference