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Nexus manual · Contesting & portable

Contesting & POTA/SOTA

Two portable/event workflows live here: Field Day (ARRL or Winter Field Day), which reshapes the app for the weekend and pushes to the club’s master log in real time, and the POTA/SOTA hunter, which finds activators and tags your contact for upload. Both are opt-in sections — enable them in the first-run wizard or Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Features.

Field Day

A settings switch turns the event on and the app reshapes for it: the exchange grammar, a live countdown that knows the real date rules, per-(call, band, mode-class) dupe checking, and a scoreboard.

Set it up first

In Settings ▸ Contesting ▸ Field Day Setup:

  1. Event — ARRL Field Day or Winter Field Day. This changes scoring labels and export headers.
  2. Class / Category and ARRL Section — these start empty on purpose, and Field Day refuses to start until you set yours. (An old default of “WI” sent the wrong exchange for everyone outside Wisconsin — now it’s a one-time deliberate step.) ARRL FD wants a class like 1D; WFD wants a category like 2O.
  3. Power multiplier — ×5 (QRP/battery ≤ 5 W), ×2 (≤ 100 W), or ×1 (> 100 W). It multiplies your QSO points; the engine clamps it to the legal values.

Operate the event

Field Day is all-mode: once you initiate a contact, the digital sequencer runs the FD exchange autonomously, and the CW and Phone cockpits’ log strips become FD entries with class/section and shared dupe checking — one laptop covers the whole operation.

The one strip that does not switch is the log strip in the Satellites section: it is not wired to Field Day yet, so a contact typed there during FD goes into your general log and scores the club nothing. Log satellite contacts from the CW or Phone cockpit while you are still on the bird — the FD log stamps each contact with the band the radio is on at the moment you type it, so one entered after you have QSY’d away files on the wrong band, both in the Cabrillo and on the N1MM / N3FJP wire.

The scoreboard shows its work: QSO points (phone 1, CW/digital 2) × the legal power multiplier + a 15-item ARRL bonus checklist = total. Winter Field Day deliberately shows raw counts only — its objectives math isn’t ARRL’s, and Nexus won’t display a fake total.

Opening Bonuses does not cost you the sections board. The board is the only part of the Field Day column that can give height, so it used to give it for everything else and collapse to a blank strip when the fifteen-row checklist opened. It carries a floor now and the column scrolls past that floor, so the board a club watches all weekend stays a board. The checklist keeps its own cap and scrolls inside itself: all fifteen rows are there, in a list of their own, rather than 290 px of checkboxes between you and the log.

Export and club interop

Exports are submittable: Cabrillo 3.0 with real per-QSO UTC timestamps and per-row mode tokens, plus ADIF with CONTEST_ID.

The club story is native:

  • Every FD contact pushes in real time to N3FJP over its official TCP API (default port 1100). Configure the master log’s host/port and use the Test N3FJP button at the site before the event.
  • Nexus also broadcasts the native N1MM+ <contactinfo> UDP datagram for N1MM-networked dashboards.

Both are fire-and-forget on background threads, so a hung logging PC can never stall your TX slot. The WSJT-X UDP Status message sets special_op = Field Day, so JTAlert/GridTracker auto-activate their FD behavior too.

Configure N3FJP and N1MM+ in Settings ▸ Logging & Connectors.

POTA / SOTA hunter

The hunter is for finding activators, not running activations. It polls the official feeds (pota.app and SOTAwatch) every 60 s.

The tour

Live spots with program toggles (POTA / SOTA / Both), band and mode filter chips, park names, and two ranking badges:

  • NEW PARK — the reference has never appeared in your log (computed from your own ADIF, not an external tracker),
  • BAND OPEN — PSK Reporter confirms your signal is reaching that band within the last 15 minutes.

Hunt an activator

  1. Click HUNT on a spot. Nexus atomically registers the park as a pending hunt target, QSYs to the spot’s frequency and mode, and opens the right cockpit.
  2. Work the activator. The next QSO you log with that call — matched by base call, so /P suffixes don’t break it — is automatically tagged with SIG/SIG_INFO (POTA) or SOTA_REF in standard ADIF, ready for the POTA uploader.

The pending hunt tags only the first matching QSO and expires after 4 hours, so a stale park reference can’t contaminate an unrelated contact next week. Activators also appear as chips on the Needed board when they’re heard on the air.

Honest limits

  • The POTA/SOTA section is hunter-only — Nexus helps you chase activators; it isn’t an activation logger for running your own park/summit.
  • Winter Field Day shows raw counts, not a computed total — by design.
  • Field Day won’t start until class and section are set — that’s a guard, not a bug.
  • The Satellites section’s log strip doesn’t join Field Day yet — unlike the CW and Phone strips it stays on the general log while a session runs. Not a design choice; not wired up yet.
  • You can’t tell the Field Day log which band a contact was on — it records a band per contact, but always the one the radio is on at the moment you type the entry; nothing lets you name a different one. Log as you work, not afterwards.

This page is synced from docs/guide/contesting-pota.md in the Nexus repo. Corrections belong there.