Settings & Configuration¶
Swipe in from the right edge to open the settings drawer. All settings are saved automatically.
The top two buttons are not settings but the two ways into help: User Manual, which opens this guide at the chapter for the screen you came from, and Need guidance?, which lists symptoms and questions in plain words. See Getting Help.
Basic and Expert¶
The drawer is grouped under headings — Station, Device, Radio, Network, Display, FT8 and Spectrum — and the toggle beside the Settings title chooses how much of it you see. It always says where you are and what a tap gives you: tapping BASIC (tap for Expert) reveals the Spectrum and Device groups, which hold the calibration and tuning controls you set once and rarely touch again.
Nothing is lost in Basic; it is only hidden. The choice is not remembered between sessions, because it is a way of looking at the drawer rather than a preference.
Radio¶
These reach the QMX itself over the CAT link.
QMX volume — the radio's own AF gain, in decibels, the same number the QMX shows on its LCD when you click its volume knob. Read back from the radio when you open the drawer, so it agrees with the rig even if you last changed it there.
QMX RF gain — the per-band RF gain from the radio's Band Configuration, 0–99 dB (the QMX default is 54). Because it is per band, the Tab5 reads it from the radio rather than remembering a number that would belong to whichever band you were on last; it shows "reading…" until the radio answers, and "radio not connected" if the radio is not there at all. Until v1.8.3 it could stick on "reading…" for a whole session: the value was only ever repainted when you next opened the drawer, so a single unanswered query left it stuck (reported by Samuel W7STF). It now fills itself in as soon as the radio replies. It writes when you let go of the slider, not while you drag, because this is stored configuration rather than a session setting. Changing it moves the noise floor, so the flat-spectrum reference is re-learned.
CW transmit offset — transmit a little away from the station you are listening to, so a QRP call is not buried in the pile of everyone zero-beating the DX (suggested by Roy KI0ER). The centre of the slider is off, and the sign chooses whether you transmit above or below.
Keep it small: around 100 Hz or less is typical, and the slider stops at ±300. The point is to land inside the other station's filter, not outside it — most CW operators run a 500 Hz filter or narrower, 200 Hz is not unusual, and the passband is not equally usable right to its edge: the tone gets muddy and a QRP signal has least energy exactly where the filter is already attenuating (Michael KZ4LY). Roy KI0ER uses +60 Hz on his own rig. Earlier versions of this page suggested 400–600 Hz, which is outside many operators' filters altogether.
!!! note "Your QMX may keep showing two frequencies afterwards"
The offset works by putting the radio in split — receive on VFO A, transmit on
VFO B. When you switch the offset off, the panadapter returns VFO B to VFO A and
drops split, and it confirms both by reading the radio back.
The QMX's own LCD may nevertheless keep showing a second frequency until you
change band or power-cycle it. That is a display artifact: nothing repaints the
second row of the LCD when the VFO mode returns to A over CAT (confirmed by
Stan KC7XE, and known on the QRP Labs list). **You are not transmitting off
frequency** — VFO B equals VFO A and split is off.
Do not use the `MU;` command to tidy it up. It does clear the display, but it
also silently drops the radio's I/Q mode, and the panadapter's spectrum goes
flat while the radio keeps streaming audio as though nothing had happened.
The QMX has no XIT, so this is done with split: you receive on VFO A and transmit on VFO B, which the Tab5 holds at your receive frequency plus the offset. Set it once and it follows you — a tap on the panadapter, a spot, a memory recall, a band change, the web page, and the radio's own tuning knob. It applies in CW and CW-R only, and leaving CW clears it. If you are running your own split, the Tab5 leaves it alone.
Let me use the QMX menus — hands the radio back. The QMX's own menu, and its Band Configuration terminal application, talk over the same USB serial port the Tab5 polls several times a second, so the two fight over it. Tap this before using the radio's own menus: the Tab5 stops sending anything, the spectrum freezes, and a blue bar across the top says so and gives the radio back when you tap it. Resuming re-checks IQ mode, which a trip through the radio's menu can switch off.
While the radio is released the Tab5 will not transmit — an armed FT8 burst and Antenna Tune are both refused rather than keying a radio you are holding.
Radio menus — the QMX's own menu system on the Tab5's screen, so you do not have to reach the radio at all. Unlike the button above it, this does not stop the panadapter: it uses the radio's second USB serial port, so CAT keeps running while you are in the menus. You have to switch that port on once, on the radio — System config → GPS & Ser. ports → USB serial ports → 2. For a QMX+ with no control panel this is the only way into its menus. See Radio Menus.
Operator Info¶
Callsign — Your amateur radio callsign (required for FT8/FT4 logging).
Grid Square — Your Maidenhead grid square (e.g., JO45; required for FT8/FT4 exchanges).
WiFi¶
Tap WiFi setup in the settings drawer to open the WiFi window.
WiFi On/Off — the WiFi icon button in the WiFi window (shown with a diagonal red slash when off). Toggling it takes effect immediately — off disconnects and stays off; on reconnects right away. Turning WiFi off is useful for field operation (no WiFi overhead, extended battery life).
SSID — Your WiFi network name. Tap Scan to list nearby networks and pick one (as of v1.3.6 this also works when your stored network is out of range — hotels, POTA sites — where it previously always reported "No networks found").
Password — Your WiFi password (pre-filled with your saved password; tap the eye icon to show/hide it). Tap Save to store it and connect.
Once connected, the settings show your IP address — use this to access the web UI from a browser.
Time Sync¶
SNTP Server — NTP pool (usually pool.ntp.org). Change only if you have a local NTP server.
Setting the time by hand — there is no control for this in the drawer, despite what earlier versions of this guide said. The clock is set from the FT8 screen: Options → Sync Time. See Setting the time by hand, which also covers setting the seconds — the part that matters with no WiFi and no GPS.
FT8-Derived Sync — Estimates the UTC offset from decoded FT8 signal timing. Offline fallback only: it is automatically ignored while SNTP or GPS is available (those are authoritative), and only nudges the clock when you're off-grid with no better source. See Time Sync.
QMX GPS — Detected automatically, no setting to toggle. If your QMX (typically a QMX+) is GPS-disciplined, the Tab5 recognises it at connect by comparing the QMX's own second-tick against SNTP, and then phase-locks to the GPS second boundary (~10 ms) as an offline time source. On a non-GPS QMX nothing happens. The bottom-bar clock shows UTC(GPS) when a GPS-disciplined QMX is the active source. A clock the Tab5 has itself pushed into the radio is never accepted as evidence of GPS — see Time Sync.
Display¶
Flip 180° — Invert the display for upside-down mounting or cable routing.
QMX volume — The radio's own AF gain, in decibels: the same number the QMX shows on its own LCD, not a percentage. Available in both Panadapter and FT8 modes. It reads the radio back each time you open the drawer, so if you turn the volume with the rig's own knob the slider follows instead of disagreeing with it. This exists mainly for QMX+ builds with no control panel, where there is no volume knob at all (Randy N4OPI's request). Nothing is sent to the radio until you move the slider, so switching on can never change your volume unexpectedly.
The slider runs 0–50 dB rather than the QMX's full 0–199 dB protocol range, so the useful part of the travel is not crammed into a couple of centimetres. 50 dB is Randy N4OPI's figure from a real radio with the antenna connected — an earlier "not loud enough" reading turned out to have been taken with the antenna off, where the missing loudness was band noise, not gain. If you turn the radio past 50 dB with its own knob the slider knob sits at the end of its travel, but the number still shows the radio's true dB — it has to agree with the LCD.
Two things worth knowing, both from Randy N4OPI's side-by-side check against a real QMX (the numbers do read identically): the QMX only shows the figure on its own LCD when you give its knob a click, and the Tab5 slider reads the radio when the drawer opens — so if you turn the rig's knob while the drawer is on screen, the slider catches up the next time you open it rather than tracking live.
Display sleep — Dropdown (Off / 1 / 2 / 5 / 10 / 30 min). After the chosen idle time the backlight turns off; FT8, the radio link, and the web UI keep running. Tap the screen to wake — the wake tap is swallowed, so it can't tune or press anything. A two-finger double-tap blanks the display immediately.
Brightness — Screen brightness (0–100%).
Spectrum Mode — - Normal — absolute dBm scale - Flat — relative to per-bin noise floor (signals pop above baseline)
Battery Care¶
Charge Limit — Optionally stop charging once the battery reaches a set percentage (default 80%), to reduce long-term wear on the pack. Enable it and choose the target in the settings drawer; charging restarts automatically if the level later falls well below the target (5% hysteresis). Leave it off to always charge to 100%.
Accurate charge reading while charging — the displayed battery percentage (and the charge-limit trigger) now compensate for the voltage rise that occurs while charging current is flowing. Previously this made the reading jump around while plugged in, and made the charge limit either stick just short of the target or oscillate; both are fixed.
"(limit)" on the battery reading (v1.9.4) — once the cap trips, the battery text on both the Tab5 and the web UI grows a (limit) suffix. Without it, "capped on purpose at 80%" and "not charging for some other reason" looked identical.
Waterfall Controls¶
Black Level (dB) — How far above noise floor to show as black (default 9 dB). Lower = more colour detail.
Contrast (dB) — Span of the colour ramp (default 45 dB). Lower = more contrast, higher = more gradation.
FFT Window — - Blackman-Harris (default) — best frequency resolution - Hann — smoother peaks - Nuttall — sharpest edges
Spur suppression — withdrawn in v1.8.9. The control is no longer in the drawer.
At some dial frequencies the QMX puts a comb of evenly spaced artifacts into the spectrum, and this setting was meant to remove them. It only ever worked at zoom ×1: above that the display is drawn from a second, finer analysis that the suppression never reached, so turning it on or off made no difference at all — and zooming in is exactly what you do when you are looking at a spur.
It also matters less than the original measurements suggested. Those were taken with the antenna disconnected, where the strongest tooth stood nearly 40 dB above the noise. With a real antenna on the same radio it measures about 23 dB, because band noise rises and buries the weaker teeth.
Nothing is lost by its absence, and the work is kept for a future release.
Wherever something is being removed, the thin line under the frequency labels turns teal. You can always see what is being touched.
!!! note "The 25 Hz nudge is real"
Learning a frequency briefly moves the radio 25 Hz and puts it back. You may
hear it on CW. It happens once per frequency, about two seconds after you stop
tuning, and not at all on a frequency already learned. This is why the feature
is off by default.
Panadapter & Zoom¶
Distance in Miles — Show FT8 distances in miles instead of km (off by default).
Band-plan region — Sets which region's band plan drives the coloured CW/Digi/Phone strip along the bottom of the screen. Auto derives it from your grid square; you can also force Region 1/2/3.
Band Presets — Add or remove custom bands. Standard bands (160–10 m) are always available.
Bluetooth mouse¶
A Bluetooth mouse is the one pointer that works while the QMX is plugged in. A USB mouse cannot: the radio occupies the Tab5's only USB host, and sharing it through a hub does not work on this hardware — both devices end up disabled. A Bluetooth mouse never touches that port, so the radio keeps its connection.
For anyone operating with cold or unsteady hands, that is the point: every menu, button and drawer control becomes a click instead of a precise tap on glass.
!!! warning "The mouse must be Bluetooth 4.0 or later" Only Bluetooth Low Energy mice work. The Tab5 gets its Bluetooth from a co-processor that has no Bluetooth Classic radio in it at all, so an older Classic mouse cannot be made to work by any firmware change.
Most mice sold since about 2014 are Low Energy. Look for **Bluetooth 4.0** or
later on the box. A dual-mode mouse works on its Low Energy channel.
**How to tell which problem you have.** A Classic mouse never appears to the
Tab5 at all — the Bluetooth symbol keeps looking and never turns blue, because
the Tab5 listens only for mice that announce themselves the Low Energy way. A
mouse that *does* connect but moves the pointer oddly is a different matter,
and that one is worth reporting.
Setting it up
- Tick Bluetooth mouse → Enable in the settings drawer.
- Restart the Tab5. Bluetooth can only start once the radio link to the wireless co-processor is up, so the switch takes effect on the next boot — the toast says so at the time.
- Put the mouse into pairing mode and wait a few seconds. It connects on its own.
You only do this once. The pairing is stored, survives a reboot and a firmware update, and the mouse reconnects by itself from then on.
The Bluetooth symbol in the bottom bar sits just left of the WiFi indicator and has three states:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Dim grey | Bluetooth is switched off |
| Pale | On and looking for a mouse |
| Blue | A mouse is connected |
What works: moving the pointer, left click, and the scroll wheel — the wheel scrolls whatever is under the pointer, so the decode list, the settings drawer and the manual all scroll.
!!! note "The pointer disappears when the mouse sleeps" A Bluetooth mouse switches itself off after about half a minute of not being moved, to save its battery. The pointer vanishes with it and comes back the instant you touch the mouse — reconnecting takes under a third of a second. This is the mouse looking after its own battery, not a fault.
Firmware updates¶
Download updates automatically (Network — on by default, v1.9.3) — when a newer release appears, the Tab5 fetches it quietly in the background so that the only thing left for you is one decision: restart now, or later. The spectrum, waterfall and FT8 decoding keep running while it downloads.
Switch it off if you are on a metered connection — a phone hotspot in a field, for example — as each update is about 3.3 MB. With it off nothing is fetched until you ask: the bottom bar still offers the update, and the window's button reads Download now.
⚠ Turning this on never installs anything by itself. Applying an update restarts the Tab5, and only you can ask for that — see Keeping It Up To Date.
Live Spots¶
Draws other stations on the spectrum at the frequency they are operating on. Full details, including what the colours mean, in Live Spots.
Live spots (POTA) — On by default. Fetches Parks On The Air activations about once a minute and draws them over the spectrum. Needs WiFi. Switching it off leaves the spectrum completely clean.
RBN spots (CW skimmers) — Off by default, and deliberately so: RBN is a continuous global feed over a persistent connection, unlike POTA's occasional fetch. Adds stations the skimmer network is hearing right now, filtered to the band you are on. Requires your callsign to be set (the feed asks for one on connect — it identifies you, it is not a password).
DX cluster spots (phone) — Off by default, same reasoning: a second persistent connection. This is the source that carries SSB. Skimmers are machines, and no machine recognises a callsign spoken into a microphone, so phone activity is structurally invisible to RBN however long you leave it on. A cluster is people typing, so it carries voice contacts, and park and summit references written into the comment. Mode is worked out from the spotter's comment, or from your band plan when the comment does not say. Relayed skimmer spots are dropped, so the cluster cannot double what RBN is already showing.
Whatever you switch on, one station is one entry: the same callsign within 2 kHz is merged, an activation spot outranks a plain sighting, and a dropped duplicate folds back in as corroboration — drawn brighter, meaning a receiver copied them just now rather than someone having typed it an hour ago.
FT8 Settings¶
FT8 On/Off — Globally enable/disable FT8 mode.
Field Day Mode — ARRL Field Day mode (on/off, class, section).
Simulation Mode — Practice QSOs with six phantom stations — no QMX needed at all, radio never keyed (red breathing border on screen). See FT8 Transmit.
Fast pounce (early decode) — On by default. Decodes surface ~1.8 s before the slot boundary (WSJT-X style), so a fresh CQ can be answered in the very next slot and mid-QSO replies land on the beat. Trade-off: the capture window closes early, so a station transmitting late in the slot can occasionally be missed. ⚠️ Not yet A/B-verified on a live band — if your decodes-per-slot drop with it on, turn it off and please report your numbers.
Distance in miles — Show the decode list's distance column in miles instead of kilometres.
Report to PSK Reporter — On by default. Uploads the stations you decode to PSK Reporter, the same as WSJT-X, so you appear on the map as a monitoring station and other operators can see where they were heard.
What is sent, over the internet only and never on the air: your callsign and grid square, and for each station you decode their callsign, their grid (if their message contained one), the frequency, the signal report and the mode. Reports are batched and sent at most once every five minutes.
It does nothing at all until both your callsign and grid are set, and it is disabled outright in Simulation Mode, so practice contacts can never reach the public map. Uncheck this box to switch it off entirely.
The first report goes out 5–5½ minutes after switching on, so nothing appears immediately. To check it is working, look for QMX Panadapter under "Software in use" at pskreporter.info/cgi-bin/pskstats.pl.
FT8 Filters — Include/exclude stations, set auto-reply priority, enable robot mode, grey-listing (see FT8 Receive for details).
Keyboard — M5Stack Tab5 snap-on keyboard support (if connected). See The snap-on keyboard below for everything it can do.
The snap-on keyboard¶
If the M5Stack Tab5 70-key snap-on keyboard is attached it is detected and needs no configuration. It does considerably more than fill in text fields.
Snap it on any time (v1.9.4) — attaching it after boot works too, found and ready to type within a couple of seconds; the same is true of taking it off and reattaching mid-session. Its two LEDs are deliberately dark once it's found - the keyboard works identically regardless of when it was attached, so there's nothing left for a light to usefully distinguish.
Typing. Any window with text fields takes the keyboard directly — WiFi setup, your callsign and grid, CQ messages, FT8 filters, memory channels. Tab moves between fields, Enter saves and Escape cancels.
Getting around.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Arrows | Scroll the settings drawer and the manual. Press repeatedly and it scrolls further each time |
| Page Up / Page Down | Move a whole screen |
| Enter | The confirming button of whatever is open — Save, Transmit, Yes |
| Escape | Closes whatever is in front of you, including the settings drawer and the memory page |
Shortcuts. Hold Ctrl and press a letter:
| Ctrl+R Radio menus | Ctrl+M User manual | Ctrl+H Need guidance? | Ctrl+L QSO log |
| Ctrl+K Memory channels | Ctrl+P Panadapter | Ctrl+F FT8 | Ctrl+S Settings drawer |
| Ctrl+D Display off |
Any key wakes the display again afterwards.
Changing them. The web page has a shortcuts editor — Miscellaneous ▸ Keyboard shortcuts. There are 25 actions to choose from, including zoom, brightness, releasing the radio to its own front panel, and every setup window. Alt is left completely unused so you can put your own bindings there without disturbing anything. See The web interface.
!!! note "Nothing that transmits can be given a shortcut" Deliberately. A button you deliberately press is one thing; a two-key combination that a slipped finger can produce is another. Calling CQ, transmitting and tuning stay where you can see them.
This keyboard has no Shift and no Fn key — Sym and Aa are handled inside the keyboard itself, so Ctrl and Alt are what shortcuts can use.
Audio & DSP¶
IQ Balance — Adaptive I/Q phase correction (usually on). Suppresses mirror-image signals.
Diagnostic Logging¶
The diagnostic log is always on — there is nothing to enable. All firmware log output is captured to a 5 MB memory ring, with a rolling copy persisted to internal flash (survives a reboot or power-off) and, if a microSD card is inserted, mirrored to the card as well (see microSD Auto-Archive for when the card copy is written — the flash copy is always complete). Download via:
- Web UI: open the Files menu in the bottom bar and click Diagnostic download ↓ (downloads both the live session log and the flash-persisted copy from before the last reboot)
- microSD card:
/qmx-panadapter/qmx-log.txt - USB serial:
tools/capture_serial_log.ps1
Useful for troubleshooting rare issues.
microSD Auto-Archive — Station Backup¶
Insert a microSD card (FAT32 or exFAT, any size — a plain 32 GB FAT32 card is ideal) before switching the Tab5 on and it automatically mirrors your whole station to /qmx-panadapter/ on the card. It's a grab-and-go backup: pull the card into a PC (or another Tab5) to back up or move your setup — no computer needed in the field.
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
qso.adi |
ADIF QSO log — after each new entry with WiFi off, otherwise at the next start-up |
qmx-config.txt |
All settings + memory channels, as INI text (restore via Config upload) |
lotw_cert.b64, lotw_key.b64 |
Your LoTW signing certificate + private key, so a restored device can sign for LoTW |
qmx-log.txt (+.1) |
Diagnostic log, rolling (rotated at 5 MB) |
README.txt |
A plain-text description of every file, written on each mount |
Insert the card before switching the Tab5 on. A card pushed in later is not picked up until the next start-up — the Tab5 can only claim the card during a short window early in boot.
When the mirror runs¶
The microSD card and the WiFi co-processor share a bus on this hardware and cannot both use it reliably. Rather than fail at an unpredictable moment, the Tab5 picks the behaviour that works:
| What happens | SD dot | |
|---|---|---|
| WiFi off (POTA/SOTA) | Continuous mirroring the whole time the card is in | Green |
| WiFi on | One complete backup within a few seconds of switching on, then mirroring stops | Yellow |
Either way your QSO log, config, and LoTW certificate and key are backed up. With WiFi on, QSOs made later in that session reach the card at the next start-up — so if you have been operating with WiFi up and want them on the card now, restart the Tab5.
If no card is inserted the dot is absent, which is not an error.
⚠️ The card holds credentials. A full backup that can restore a station necessarily includes secrets:
qmx-config.txtstores your WiFi password and QRZ/eQSL logins in clear text, andlotw_key.b64is your LoTW private key. Keep the card as physically secure as a house key. (The on-cardREADME.txtrepeats this warning.)The diagnostic log is always-on regardless of whether an SD card is present. If no card is inserted, the log still persists to internal flash (see Diagnostic Logging above) and survives a power-off.
Activation (POTA / SOTA)¶
When you are activating a park or a summit, every contact you make has to be logged as belonging to that reference — it is what POTA and SOTA read to credit the activation, for you and for the people who worked you.
Open Activation (POTA/SOTA) in the settings drawer, pick the scheme, type the reference, and tap Start activation. From then on every logged QSO carries it automatically. There is nothing to remember per contact.
The screen shows your contact count against the threshold — ten for POTA, four for SOTA — and turns green when you reach it. That number is read from the log itself, so it survives a reboot and can never disagree with what was actually written.
Stopping matters as much as starting. While a session is running the main button is a red Stop activation, and the drawer button itself shows the live reference rather than a generic label. The failure that actually happens is driving home with it still switched on, quietly stamping every later contact with a park you have left.
The session persists across a restart on purpose — a battery change in the field should not lose it — but it is deliberately not included in a config backup, so restoring an old backup can never re-activate a park you are nowhere near.
Chasing works without any setup: if you work a station the panadapter has seen spotted at a park or summit, that reference is written into your log entry automatically.
Uploading just one activation: the web UI's ADIF download can be limited to a single reference, so you get that park's log rather than your entire file.
SWR protection¶
While transmitting, the QMX reports its SWR back over the control link. If the reading reaches the limit you set here the transmitter is latched off — nothing will transmit again until you clear it by tapping the red warning on the FT8 screen.
Choose Off, 2.0:1, 2.5:1, 3.0:1 or 4.0:1. The default is 3.0:1.
In FT8 the burst is cut short; the SWR is sampled part-way through and the transmission stops there. In FT4 the check happens after the burst, so the one burst completes and every later one is blocked. That is not an oversight: FT4 symbols are 48 ms and a control-link query takes about 50 ms, so asking mid-burst would disturb the transmission it is trying to protect. A reading is only acted on if there is real power behind it — the radio can report a meaningless ratio when the amplifier is not actually loaded. That is high enough not to trip on a merely mediocre match, and low enough to stop a burst going into a disconnected antenna, a wrong-band antenna or a damaged feedline — which is how this usually goes wrong in the field. An FT8 transmission is nearly thirteen seconds of continuous key-down, so there is real time to save.
The latch is deliberately sticky. A bad antenna does not repair itself, and resuming automatically would simply transmit into the same fault on the next slot.
!!! note "Set it to Off if you use a tuner" With a matched antenna the protection never fires, but if you are deliberately loading something unusual you may prefer no interference at all.
Propagation feedback — who is hearing me¶
This asks PSK Reporter which receivers have copied your callsign recently. It is the reverse of the reports the panadapter sends, and the two are separate settings — you can have either without the other.
It answers a question no amount of local processing can: am I actually getting out? The valuable case is the mismatch. Stations you can hear that cannot hear you is a transmit-side problem — antenna, power, a bad connector — and from the receiving side alone it looks exactly like a dead band.
This one lives in the browser, not on the Tab5. There is no drawer control for it — the answer is a list of stations with distances and bearings, which wants a screen you are already sitting in front of. In the web UI open Settings → Spots & reporting and tick Propagation feedback (who is hearing me), then Miscellaneous → Who is hearing me for the list: receiver, country, distance, bearing and the signal report they gave you, sorted by distance.
It is read-only and asks at most once every five minutes, which is the rate PSK Reporter requests.
!!! note "An empty list is the normal answer if you have not transmitted" Nobody can report hearing you until you have been on the air. Give it a few minutes after a CQ run.
ADIF & Logging¶
ADIF Log — View the QSO log on-device. The viewer shows a proper column table:
| Column | Content |
|---|---|
| Call | Callsign |
| Country | DXCC entity (looked up from the callsign prefix) |
| Mode | FT8 or FT4 |
| Band | Band (20m, 40m, …) |
| Date | UTC date |
| Time | UTC time |
| Sent | Your signal report (SNR) |
| Rcvd | Their signal report (SNR) |
A sticky header row stays pinned while you scroll. Even-numbered rows are lightly shaded so long logs stay easy to scan.
Today/All filter — the viewer opens on Today (falling back to All when nothing was logged today). The toggle button shows the view you switch to by pressing it; the title shows the current view with counts.
POTA activation counter — in the Today view the title reads "Today: N (M total)" and turns green once today reaches 10 QSOs — a valid POTA activation.
Delete a single record — long-press a QSO row: the row highlights red and list scrolling locks. Drag up/down to move the highlight, then release — a Delete/Cancel bar appears at the bottom. Delete removes just that one record (useful for duplicates).
Delete all — the red-bordered button at the bottom-left erases the whole log. Two-tap confirm: the first tap arms it (the label changes to "ALL N?"), a second tap within 5 seconds deletes; wait and it disarms itself. There is no undo — download the ADIF from the web UI first if you want a copy. Handy before a POTA activation: start with an empty log and the ADIF at the end is exactly the file you submit.
Use the web UI to download the full ADIF file for import into WSJT-X, EQSL, or any other logging software — or view and edit it in the browser (QSO Logs → View / edit log).
Exclude Worked Before — When FT8 filtering, skip stations you've already logged QSOs with (requires you to import your own prior ADIF log first).
Config Import/Export¶
Config Download — Export all settings + memory channels + ADIF log as a text file (INI format).
Config Upload — Restore settings from a backup file (settings only; memory channels merge).
Use this to: - Back up your settings before a factory reset - Transfer settings to another Tab5 - Recover from accidental changes
Advanced / Expert¶
These two live in the browser, not in the drawer — a reset you can trigger by mistake on a touchscreen in the field is a worse idea than one that needs a computer. Both are in the web UI's Miscellaneous ▲ menu.
Reset settings — Erases the stored settings and memory channels, returning everything to defaults, and reboots. Use if something is stuck in a state you cannot get out of. Take a Config ↓ backup first and you can restore it in seconds.
Reset WiFi — Erases the WiFi credentials and the stored radio/link state. This is the one for a WiFi setup that will not come up no matter what you enter.
Neither of them touches your QSO log. The ADIF log lives in a separate area of flash that is deliberately left alone, so a reset cannot cost you contacts — and neither can a firmware update, which is why a normal flash keeps your log. The only things that erase the log are the Delete all button in the ADIF viewer, the same in the web log viewer, and a clean/erase flash from the flasher.
Next: Troubleshoot an issue via Troubleshooting or explore the API.