Conditions — map + propagation

Conditions 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.

Conditions has no radio controls. The bar across the top of the other screens (the frequency, the band list, TX Off, Tune and Stop TX) is not shown here, so the map and its panes get the whole height. To stop a transmission while Conditions is on screen, press Esc, or go to any other screen and press Stop TX there. The bar’s UTC clock stays: it sits at the end of Conditions’ own header in every layout, with your local time beside it if you turned that on in Settings ▸ Workspace. In the dashboard window and on the TV page the bar across the top carries the big clock instead.

The tour

The map

One map picker at the top of the map chooses the view:

• Globe — a 2-D globe you can spin and zoom (where a new view starts),
• 3D — the shaded WebGL globe (greyed out on a PC whose graphics can’t run it),
• Flat — the world map with shaded relief,
• Beam — an azimuthal-equidistant beam map with true great-circle headings from your QTH.

Each intent preset remembers its own pick. Layers sits in the top-left corner of every view and folds away to a pill, the same way the Propagation card does.

The Layers menu toggles what’s drawn on top:

• Greyline with graded civil / nautical / astronomical twilight,
• Sun and moon — the sun where it is overhead, at the centre of the day side, and the moon where it is overhead, lit as much as the real one and on the side you see lit from your hemisphere (on by default; during an M-class flare the flare layer’s animated sun takes the sun’s place),
• 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 Layers menu in Nexus 1.10.3. Which boxes are ticked is one operator’s preference, not a recommendation.

The street map

Street is an optional fifth choice in the map picker: a street-level map of your area, downloaded once and kept on your computer, with your Conditions layers drawn on it. Until you download an area it carries a download badge, and pressing it opens the download sheet:

• Where — around your station (from your grid square) or around the map’s centre,
• How big — a square 50, 100, 200 or 400 km across,
• Detail — All streets or Main roads.

The sheet shows the exact size before anything downloads, your free disk space (a download needs twice its size free) and the map data’s licence. A download carries on while you use Nexus, shows its percent on the Street choice, and resumes after a restart or a dropped connection.

On the street map, drag and the mouse wheel move the map, a double-click on a spot or park works it as anywhere else, and a double-click elsewhere zooms in. From about city zoom, a station or spot known only by its grid square is drawn as that square’s outline, not a pin (parks and APRS stations with their own coordinates stay pins), and grid labels run down to 6- and 8-character squares. The world-scale layers (MUF, aurora, flare, PCA, band heat) are greyed in Layers there: they show no street-level detail. Street needs WebGL2; where a Street pick cannot draw (no area downloaded, or graphics without WebGL2) the map shows Flat and says why.

Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Map & globe ▸ Street maps lists each area you have (size, detail and the date of its map data), checks for newer map data only when you press Check for updates, and removes an area, saying how much space that frees.

Street maps live outside your data folder, and uninstalling Nexus leaves them. To remove them by hand, close Nexus and delete:

• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Nexus\maps
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Nexus/maps. Nexus’s other local files on a Mac (its diagnostics log, ALL.TXT and the SSTV gallery) are in a second folder, ~/.local/share/Nexus; delete that too to remove everything Nexus keeps on the computer.
• Linux: ~/.local/share/Nexus/maps

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).

The pane grid

Around the globe is an 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. Every pane renders in full; the one-line plain-language version of a pane is what you see while it is waiting on data, offline, or has nothing to report, not a density setting. (There was a Basic / Expert switch that chose between the two by hand; it was removed on 2026-07-26 and there is no such control now.)

You don’t have to keep all seven. Each pane has a ✕ on its header to close it, and the Panels menu in the Conditions header lists what’s closed so you can bring it back, with Undo and Reset layout. When a pane closes, its neighbour takes the space; close both panes on a side and the map takes the width. Drag the edge of a side column to make it wider or narrower (200–720 px; the map never goes below 280 px), or drag between its two panes. Both handles also work from the keyboard, and a double-click puts the default back. What you close and how wide you make things is remembered per window, and a saved width is trimmed to fit a smaller screen. Reset layout puts every pane back open at the usual widths, the Standard layout, including which pane sits in each slot.

A pane’s own menu. Each pane’s header has a ⋯ button beside the ✕ (the picker next to it is a little narrower to make room, and in the narrowest columns a long pane title can end in ”…”). Its A+ Larger text and A− Smaller text make that pane’s words bigger or smaller, from 80% to 160% of your Text size (Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Workspace), 10% a press; the menu stays open and shows the size, so you can press again. Only the words change: the pane keeps its place and size, its header stays as it was, and a pane whose text no longer fits scrolls. Each pane keeps its own size in each window. A layout from the Panels menu keeps the sizes; Reset layout puts every pane back at 100%. The same menu has ? … in the manual, which opens this manual in your browser at the part about that pane; a pane this manual does not describe yet has no link.

Tabs. A slot can hold more than one pane. ⋯ ▸ Add a tab lists the panes it can take; pick one and it joins the slot, shown, and the slot’s title becomes a row of tabs (in a narrow column, a row of its own under the picker, ⋯ and ✕). Click a tab to switch, or use ← →, Home and End on it. The picker changes the pane on the tab that is showing, and ⋯ ▸ Remove … from this slot takes it out. A pane is only ever in one slot: adding one from another slot moves it, and a slot’s only pane is not offered, since that slot would be empty. Each slot reopens on the tab it was showing. A layout from the Panels menu, or Reset layout, puts one pane back in each slot; Undo brings the tabs back.

In the dashboard window and on the TV page, a slot with tabs can also show them in turn: ⋯ ▸ Rotate the tabs and pick 10 s, 15 s, 30 s, 1 min or 2 min. It is off until you pick one. It waits while the mouse is over the slot, while you are in it with the keyboard and while its menu is open, and starts the interval again after. The main window’s Conditions never rotates, so what you are looking at while you operate never changes by itself.

Layouts. The Layout button in the Conditions header, beside ⊞ Panels, opens five ready-made arrangements of the same panes (the Panels menu shows the same choices at its top), and names the layout on screen: Standard (every pane open, as Conditions opened before Frame + bar became the default), one of the five, Your earlier layout (below), or Custom once you have moved or resized anything yourself. Standard is the first choice in the list, so going back to it is one tap, and Undo takes that tap back like any other. Unlike Reset layout, it keeps your panes’ text sizes.

Layout	Left column	Right column	Bottom row	Column width
Map first	Best band, Band Advisor	Chase, Space Wx	closed	the narrowest, 200 px
List first	Chase, Chase Feed	Getting Out, Openings	closed	wide, 560 px
Dashboard	Space Wx, Band Advisor	Chase, Getting Out	Openings, Band Outlook, Greyline	400 px
Frame	Band Advisor, Space Wx	Getting Out, Chase	closed, so the map runs the full height (and Satellites turns on)	400 px
Frame + bar (default)	Bands for you, Openings	Chase, Getting Out	closed, so the map runs the full height	400 px

A layout applies only when you pick it, and nothing snaps back afterwards: change a pane or a width and the menu reads Custom. Over an arrangement of your own the menu says that a pick replaces it, and Undo puts it back, widths included. The panes a layout closes stay in their slots, so ticking one in the menu brings back what the layout parked there. On a smaller window the columns narrow to fit (the map keeps its 280 px minimum). With a large zoom on a smaller screen every pane keeps its title bar, with its picker and ✕, in view, and when even that does not fit, Conditions scrolls. A layout never changes the map’s own settings: the Globe, 3D, Flat or Beam pick, the layers and the colouring stay as you left them for each intent. The one exception is Frame, which also turns on Satellites on the map and the 3-D globe. It never turns a layer off, if you untick Satellites afterwards it stays off, and Undo turns it back off with the rest of the layout.

Frame + bar (default) is how Conditions opens. It puts the dashboard window’s bar across the top of Conditions: your callsign and grid, a big UTC clock beside your local time, and the day’s SFI, Kp, sunspot number, A, X-ray and solar-wind speed. Its four boxes keep the others one click away as tabs: Band Advisor, Bands by region, Activity Matrix and Best band behind Bands for you; Sporadic-E, Openings Log, Insights and 24h Band×Hour behind Openings; Chase Feed, Selection, Contests and Satellite Passes behind Chase; Space Wx, Kp outlook, Measured MUF, NCDXF Beacons and Greyline behind Getting Out. The closed bottom row keeps Band Outlook and the Clock, Rotor and Amplifier, and Band Scope. Clicking a tab is not a change of layout. The bar stays while you change things yourself; another layout, Undo or Reset layout takes it away. The map is left as you had it, its Propagation card included.

The switch to Frame + bar, once. After the update Conditions opens in Frame + bar once, in the main window, the dashboard window and on the TV page, whatever layout it had. If you had arranged it yourself, your arrangement is kept: Layout ▸ Your earlier layout brings it back exactly, with its boxes, tabs, widths and splits, in one tap, and it stays in the list. If you were on Standard or one of the five layouts, pick it again. The switch happens once and never again, even after a reinstall or a restore from a backup. A dashboard window you never arranged follows the main window, as it always has. The TV page opens in its own Frame + bar, without the boxes it can never fill there: Space Wx and the Kp outlook take Chase’s place, and the closed row keeps Band Outlook, Satellite Passes and the Clock.

Conditions in its own window. ⧉ Pop out in the Conditions header opens Conditions as a dashboard window for a second monitor or a screen of its own. It opens at 1600 × 1000, or your whole screen if that is smaller, with the full layout, and a bar across the top shows your callsign and grid, a big UTC clock beside your local time, and the day’s SFI, Kp, sunspot number, A, X-ray and solar-wind speed (a dash for each when there is no live data, and a note when the numbers are old). In a storm Kp, X-ray and the solar wind turn amber when the Space Wx box’s gauges reach their warning level (in the light theme the number stays dark, underlined in amber). The sunspot number is NOAA’s daily count, shown with the day it is from, as in the Space Wx box. Close it and it comes back on the same monitor, in the same place and at the same size; if that monitor is gone it opens in the middle of your main screen, sized to fit. The window keeps its own layout, so a layout picked there leaves the main window’s Conditions as it was. On Windows the bar also has a Stay behind button: pressed, the window stays behind your other windows even when you click on it, so it can fill a screen behind Nexus without covering the cockpit. A click on it still moves the keyboard to it: until you click back into Nexus the keyboard is the dashboard’s, so Esc stops nothing then. The Stop TX button always works (with Conditions in the main window there is none: click back into Nexus and press Esc).

Beside a cockpit: the dashboard rail. The same boxes can stand in a column at the right of an operating cockpit (Operate, Phone, CW, RTTY, PSK, SSTV, APRS and JS8), so the time, the bands and who hears you stay in view while you operate. It is off until you turn it on: tick Dashboard rail in the cockpit’s ⊞ Panels menu, or press Dashboard at the right end of the Now-Bar. Each cockpit remembers its own choice. The rail opens with the Clock, Bands for you, Space Wx and Getting Out; each box has the same picker as a Conditions slot, so any pane can take its place, its ✕ closes it, and the ⊞ Panels menu in the rail’s head brings a closed box back or resets the rail. A box’s ⋯ sets its own text size there as on Conditions (tabs stay Conditions’), and the rail’s Reset puts every box back at 100%. Drag the rail’s left edge to make it wider or narrower (200–720 px), or the line between two boxes to share the height between them; both also work from the keyboard, and a double-click puts the default back. The rail shows only on a large window, about 1600 px wide at your zoom (a 1366×768 laptop at its usual 85 % qualifies), and the cockpit beside it is never narrower than it is on a 1024×768 screen, so a saved width is trimmed to fit. On a smaller window the rail stays hidden, and the ⊞ Panels entry keeps your choice and says why. The rail has no transmit control, and clicking a station in it selects that station in the rail only, never the station your cockpit is working. A Spots or POTA / SOTA box works a spot there as it does on Conditions: a click on a spot, or on HUNT, moves the radio to the station and opens its screen. Nothing transmits. The rail reads the same live data Conditions does, and within a window the two share each request, so nothing is fetched twice.

The panes you can assign:

Pane	Shows
Best band	the propagation headline (which band is best now) + any warning banners
Band Advisor	every HF band ranked best-first, with plain reasoning
Bands for you	each band as a tile saying Open, Marginal or Closed for you now, with a dot when the band is being heard, ★ on the best band and a ring on your radio’s band; click a tile to show that band on the map
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
Openings Log	every band opening Nexus has detected (6 m and 2 m tropo, sporadic-E, aurora), with its band, kind, start, length, longest path and the most stations heard, kept from one session to the next
Space Wx	solar/geomagnetic gauges (the solar-wind speed among them), 30-day solar flux and sunspot-number lines from NOAA’s daily indices, and the NOAA scales annunciator
Kp outlook	NOAA’s three-day planetary-K forecast as bars, the measured hours solid and the forecast hollow, with when a storm is expected to start or settle
Getting Out	who is hearing you right now: a compass, and every station that heard you in the last half hour, with its direction and distance, band, SNR and how long ago
Bands by 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, and the elevation on an az/el rotator (appears once a rotctld is configured)
Contests	upcoming HF and VHF contests from the WA7BNM calendar, grouped as on now, soon, this week and later
Band Scope	a live spectrum of your radio’s passband, band noise and signals at a glance; flat while the radio’s audio is not reaching Nexus
Amplifier	your linear’s own readings (appears once an amplifier is configured)
Clock	UTC and local time in large digits, the date, and today’s sunrise and sunset at your grid
Spots	the Spots screen’s list of every spot on the air, with its search and filters; a click works the station exactly as it does there
POTA / SOTA	the POTA/SOTA hunter’s list, with its tabs, Hide worked today, Refresh and HUNT; its band, mode and sort choices open on its Filter button

The Spots and POTA / SOTA boxes are those screens’ own lists, so a click on a spot or on HUNT does what it does there, and nothing transmits. In Conditions’ own window (⧉ Pop out) they work the same way, through that window’s own Needed and POTA/SOTA boards, and the main window follows to the screen the station needs. Each box keeps its own filters, apart from the screen’s. In a narrow box the Spots list shows the call, the frequency and the mode, adds the age, the country and the comment as the box widens, and shows every column from about 640 px; the list scrolls inside the box. The wall display (the TV page) shows no spot list, and each box says so there.

The default 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.

The Amplifier pane

If you run a linear — an SPE Expert (1.3K-FA / 1.5K-FA / 2K-FA) or an Elecraft KPA500/KPA1500 — put it on its own serial port, set it under Settings ▸ Radio ▸ Amplifier, and assign this pane to a slot. It shows power out, SWR at the antenna and before the tuner, supply volts and current, PA temperature, and the amplifier’s own alarms and warnings.

The Amplifier pane in Nexus 1.10.3. Everything in it is telemetry the amplifier reported — there is no control here. Operate/Standby and the band ladder ride in the cockpit’s own amplifier strip, where you are transmitting. The temperature prints with a degree sign and no scale letter because the SPE protocol does not state the unit. No amplifier was connected for this capture; the readings are a documentation fixture.

It has to be its own port. A serial port can only be opened once, so an amplifier typed onto the CAT port does not give you a silent amplifier — it gives you a radio that will not connect. Nexus checks for that and warns, naming the radio and the port.

Two things it deliberately does not do. Readings clear the moment a poll goes unanswered, rather than holding the last value: a stale wattage beside a dead link is a fabricated number, and an em dash is not. And an alarm code this build has never seen still shows as a fault rather than going quiet — the failure direction in front of a kilowatt has to be toward telling you.

The SPE temperature carries no °C or °F letter, because the protocol does not say which it is; the amplifier reports whatever its own front panel is set to. The Elecraft does carry one, because Elecraft documents it.

And you can drive it from wherever you are operating. With an amplifier configured, every cockpit header — Phone, CW, Operate, RTTY, PSK and SSTV — carries a compact strip: Standby/Operate, band ◀ ▶, and power out. Nothing is added for the stations that have no amplifier; the strip simply is not there.

Operate reads from the amplifier itself rather than from your click, so the button shows where the amplifier actually is even when you press its front-panel key instead. Both controls are refused while you are transmitting: changing band on a keyed amplifier can damage it, and dropping to standby mid-over does not stop anything — the exciter keeps keying and the drive passes straight through. For the same reason, standby is not a way to stop a transmission and the strip is not a stop control.

Nexus will never switch your amplifier off. That command is not merely unused; it does not exist in the code, so no future change can reach it by accident.

Following the radio’s band is optional and off by default. Turn it on under Settings ▸ Radio ▸ Amplifier and the amplifier steps to whatever band you tune to. It steps one band at a time and reads where the amplifier actually is after each step, so a step it ignored — or one you undid at the front panel — is seen and re-issued rather than assumed. On a band your amplifier does not have it does nothing rather than picking the nearest, and it never moves anything while you are transmitting.

⚠️ Most SPE stations should leave it off. An SPE is normally wired to follow the radio through its own band-data cable, in hardware. Where that cable is fitted this setting is a second thing steering one band — redundant at best, and at worst two controllers disagreeing about where the amplifier should be.

Core workflows

Assign a pane to a slot

A pane picker open in Nexus 1.10.3, when its headings were Panels, B2 and B3. They now say what the boxes under them are for: Bands, Space weather, Activity and Station, in the picker and in ⋯ ▸ Add a tab alike. Any pane in any group can go in any 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. Your layout persists across sessions — the grid comes back as you left it.

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. Chase leads with the top few; Chase Feed is 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.

Band Outlook in Nexus 1.10.3 with a call selected. The heading becomes Path to G4XYZ and the engine names itself on the right (P.533) — everything in this pane is modelled, including the FT8/CW/SSB chips. The observed half is a different pane: Getting Out lists the stations that actually reported hearing you. Both are documentation fixtures here — no path was solved for a real contact, and nobody reported this station.

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 Conditions 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. Beside an operating cockpit on a large window, its last button, Dashboard, shows or hides the dashboard rail (above).

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