Spots

Spots is the raw feed: every DX-cluster and Reverse Beacon Network spot Nexus has taken in over the last twenty minutes, in one table, unranked. It is the “what’s on the air” list — the Needed board is the “what should I work” list. Nothing here is scored against your log, nothing is hidden because you worked it in 1998, and nothing carries an evidence line; you get the report as it arrived, a column to sort it by, and the same single-click work-it path the Needed board has.

Spots is on by default: the first-run Goals step keeps it on under DX chasing & awards, Contesting and Everything (expert) and leaves it off under the other three profiles, and Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Features turns it on or off any time. It describes itself there as “Every cluster/RBN spot on the air — the raw firehose, filter by band/mode.”

The tour

The header holds the row count and, whenever anything is narrowing the list, a second count reading “of N” — so you always know how much of the firehose you are looking at. Beside it sit the hint “every spot on the air — single-click to work it”, the search box, and the Filter button, which reads Filtered while any chip filter is set.

What feeds it. Two RBN skimmer firehoses — CW and digital — plus every human DX-cluster node you list in Settings ▸ Logging & Connectors, unioned into one buffer. RBN carries CW and digital only, so phone rows come from the human nodes: with no node configured this board is nearly all CW and FT8. PSK Reporter does not feed it — that is the Needed board’s evidence lane and the propagation nowcast’s — and neither do your own radio’s decodes. The panel re-reads the buffer every 15 seconds, so a spot is on screen within a quarter-minute of the feed carrying it, and it ages out of the buffer at 20 minutes (the Needed board’s window is 15, so Spots holds a station about five minutes longer).

One row per station per frequency. A second report of the same call within 2 kHz replaces the row and resets its age rather than adding another line, so a station being spotted every thirty seconds by six skimmers stays one row that stays fresh instead of filling the screen.

The columns, left to right:

• Age — compact: seconds under a minute, then minutes, then hours.
• Call — a button, not text. Clicking it opens that station’s QRZ.com page in your browser and does not work the spot.
• Entity — the DXCC entity resolved from the callsign; — when it doesn’t resolve.
• St — the US state resolved for the spot, — when it could not be. It is a hint from the FCC callsign→state index, refined by a cached grid for a station you have heard before; sorting by it puts the unresolved rows last in both directions.
• Band — the band-plan label, — when the frequency is off the plan.
• Freq — MHz to three decimals.
• Mode — the specific mode when the RBN wire carried one (FT8, FT4, RTTY, PSK, CW), otherwise the class Nexus derives from the frequency: CW, Phone or Digital. Hovering says which you are looking at (“FT8 spot (Digital)”). A human node’s free-text mode is never read as a mode.
• Spotter — who reported it most recently.
• Comment — the spot’s comment text, verbatim.

Sorting. Seven of the nine headings are buttons — Age, Call, Entity, St, Band, Freq, Mode. Click to sort, click the same one again to reverse it; an arrow marks the active column. Band sorts by frequency, because a band column ordered by frequency reads the way a band map does. Ties break by age in the sort’s own direction — newest first ascending, oldest first once you reverse it. Spotter and Comment don’t sort.

The filter drawer opens from the Filter button and holds five controls plus Clear. Two of them work in opposite directions, which is the thing to learn:

• Band chips — 160 m through 6 m always, plus any other band present in the current spots. Selected means show only these. Nothing selected shows every band.
• Mode chips — the specific modes actually in the feed right now, in operating order (CW, Phone, then the digital submodes). These work the other way round: everything is shown by default and clicking a chip hides that mode (“Hide FT4 spots”). Nexus stores what you hid, not what you kept, so a mode that first turns up mid-session shows rather than arriving silently hidden.
• US state chips — the states resolved for the spots in hand. Selected means show only these, and a spot whose state didn’t resolve drops out while any state chip is on.
• My privileges — “Show only spots you may transmit to under your license class (Settings ▸ Station). Open class sees everything either way.” The flag is computed from the same tables as the transmit lockout, so what survives this filter is exactly what you can key on.
• Heard on my continent — this one starts ON. It keeps only the spots somebody on your continent actually heard. A station reported solely from another continent says nothing about a path from your station, which is the same test the Needed board applies. The chip carries the count of what it is holding back — Heard on my continent · 326 hidden — so the answer to “where are my spots” is on the chip. Turn it off for the worldwide cluster feed.
• Clear wipes the chips, the privileges toggle and the continent filter. It does not touch the search box — that is the one thing Clear leaves alone.

While any chip filter is set the drawer stays on screen — you can’t end up looking at a short list with no visible sign of what is shortening it, and the Filter button itself reads Filtered.

Search narrows on space-separated terms that AND together, each term matching any field: call, entity, spotter, mode, band or frequency. So w1 20m cw is W1-callsigns spotted on 20 m CW. A term may carry a wildcard and is then matched as a whole word — PA* finds the PA prefix, the same way it does in the Tempo stations list; a term without one behaves as it always has. Esc or the ✕ clears it. The Comment column is displayed but not searched.

Filters, search text, sort column and the drawer’s open state all survive leaving the section and coming back — they are held for the life of the app run and go when you quit.

Core workflows

Work a spot

1. Click the row anywhere except the callsign. Nexus QSYs band, mode and exact frequency in one step and opens the cockpit matching the spot’s mode class: CW → CW, Phone → Phone, everything else → the digital cockpit.
2. On an FT8 or FT4 row the tier switches first, then the QSY to the spot’s exact frequency wins over the tier’s default dial — click an FT4 spot and the decoder is on FT4, not left on FT8.
3. If the freshest comment for that call names a listening offset — UP 2, DN 1.5, or QSX 14025.5 (an absolute listening frequency in kHz) — rig split is pre-set so your transmit lands where the DX is listening.
4. On a CW or Phone row the callsign is prefilled in the log strip; a toast confirms ”▶ CALL — mode band, ready to log”.
5. If the matching cockpit is switched off (CW, Phone and RTTY are all opt-in), the rig still QSYs and you stay where you are rather than being dropped on a hidden view.

An RTTY row opens the digital cockpit at the RTTY frequency, not the RTTY cockpit — only FT8 and FT4 route by submode; everything else routes by the frequency-derived class. The row’s tooltip offers “Work CALL …” only when the spot’s band is one your band plan knows; on any other band it just names the spot, frequency and spotter.

Cut the firehose down to what you can work

Spots in Nexus 1.10.3 on a busy evening. Only one filter is on — the default one — and the header shows exactly what it costs: 1520 of 1846, with the chip itself saying 326 hidden. The bands and states are the operator’s own; nothing here is a setting to copy.

Read the header before anything else. The big number is what you are looking at; the “of N” beside it is what came in. They differ whenever something is narrowing the list, and the difference is the whole arithmetic: 1846 in the buffer − 326 held back by the continent filter = 1520 on screen. No filter is silent.

A worked pass, from that starting state:

Step	What you click	What happens to the count
Start	nothing	1520 of 1846. Filter reads Filtered, because “Heard on my continent” is on by default.
See everything	the Heard on my continent chip, turning it off	The 326 come back. The header drops the “of N” — nothing is narrowing any more.
Include a band	20m	Only 20 m rows remain. Add 40m and you get 20 m and 40 m — band chips are a show-only-these set, so each one you add widens the result.
Exclude a mode	FT8	FT8 rows go. Mode chips run the other way — everything shows until you click, and each click narrows. The hover says which way round you are: “Show FT8 spots” or “Hide FT8 spots”.
Include a state	TX	Only Texas rows survive — and every row whose state never resolved drops too, so this cuts harder than it looks.
Search	type cq in the box	Terms AND together across call, entity, spotter, mode, band and frequency, on top of whatever the chips left.
Reset	Clear	Every chip, My privileges and the continent filter go back to nothing selected. The search box still says cq — Clear does not touch it. Clear that with Esc or its own ✕.

The rule in one line: band and state chips include, mode chips exclude, search is a separate narrowing on top, and Clear resets everything except the search.

For the common job — trimming to what you can actually work:

1. Open Filter and turn on My privileges — everything you may not transmit to disappears. (An Open-class, non-US operator has every spot licensed, so the toggle changes nothing.)
2. Select the band chips you have an antenna for.
3. Hide the modes you don’t operate — one click per mode chip.
4. Leave Heard on my continent on unless you are deliberately looking at the worldwide feed.

What’s left is a working list, and it stays that way while you move around the app.

Chase a state for WAS

Open Filter, pick the state chips you still need, and sort by Age. Only spots whose state Nexus could resolve remain — a cluster spot of a station it can’t place is not shown as “maybe”, it’s gone while the filter is on.

Find one station in a contest weekend

Type into the search box. A call fragment, an entity, a spotter’s call or a frequency all match, and terms stack: ja 15m is Japan on 15 metres. When the board is empty it says which case you’re in — “No spots match the current filters — clear to see all”, or “No spots yet — cluster/RBN spots appear here as they arrive.”

Honest limits

• No ranking and no log awareness. No need chips, no ATNO colouring, no worked-before marking, no evidence line, and no dedupe against your log — a row is a report, not an opportunity. Everything that judges a station’s value to your log lives on the Needed board.
• Cluster and RBN only. PSK Reporter reception reports and your own radio’s decodes never appear here, however good the path they prove. And since RBN skimmers only spot CW and digital, phone coverage is exactly as wide as the human cluster nodes you have configured.
• The Mode column is a judgement about frequency, except where an RBN skimmer named the mode. A DX SSB station parked below the US phone edge on 40 or 80 m (7.085, say) falls in the data window and reads Digital. That is deliberate: the free-text mode token in a spot comment is unreliable everywhere else, so the number on the dial is trusted instead.
• Beacons and bulletins are not badged on this board. Nexus does identify NCDXF/IARU beacon slots and W1AW bulletin frequencies, and badges them in the Phone and CW cockpits’ Band Activity strip — this table shows them as ordinary rows, so a click can QSY you to a one-way transmission that will never come back to you.
• One spotter per row. The other stations that reported the same DX are folded into the row behind the scenes and not displayed, and CQ zone isn’t shown at all.
• One filter is on before you touch anything. Heard on my continent starts on, so a fresh board is already hiding spots nobody on your continent heard. It is not hidden from you — the header count and the chip’s own “N hidden” both say so — but it is the reason a count here can be smaller than a cluster window’s.
• Filters are for this run of the app. They survive leaving the section and coming back, and they are gone at exit — unlike the Needed board’s, which persist across restarts.
• Spots doesn’t tear off. There is no ⧉ pop-out for this board; the Needed board, Connect and the cockpit band maps detach, this one doesn’t.
• Twenty minutes, and nothing before that. No history, no export, no “what did I miss while I was away”.
• Declaring an unassisted entry empties the board. The switch stops cluster/RBN ingestion and the read returns nothing, so a spot that arrived a second before you flipped it is invisible immediately rather than lingering until the buffer drains.

Related guides

• Needed — DX that’s on the air now
• Connect — map + propagation
• DXpeditions
• Settings reference