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Nexus manual · DX & awards

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.
  • 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. Six of the eight headings are buttons — Age, Call, Entity, 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 four things:

  • Band chips — 160 m through 6 m always, plus any other band present in the current spots. Selected chips mean show only these.
  • 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 (from the FCC callsign→state index, refined by a cached grid for a station you have heard before). Selected chips mean 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 ▸ license). 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.
  • Clear wipes the chips and the privileges toggle. It does not touch the search box.

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.

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. 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

  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.

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; CQ zone isn’t shown either, and the resolved US state is filter-only — it never gets a column.
  • 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.

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