Live Spots¶

Live spots put other stations on your spectrum, at the frequency they are actually operating on, so you can see who is where without leaving the radio.

Two sources feed the same display:

Source	What it tells you	Default
POTA (Parks On The Air)	Park activations currently spotted, any mode	On
RBN (Reverse Beacon Network)	CW stations the skimmer network is hearing right now	Off (opt-in)

Both need WiFi. Nothing here transmits, and nothing here touches the radio until you tap a spot.

1. What you see¶

Spots are drawn over the spectrum, the way a FlexRadio or similar SDR shows them — the callsign sits around the middle of the spectrum with a thin vertical line dropping from it down to the frequency axis, so the line points at the frequency the station is on. The line is only 2 px wide, so the trace stays readable underneath.

Colour tells you what a spot means:

Colour	Meaning
Amber	A POTA activation
Bright green	An RBN (CW skimmer) spot
Grey	You have already worked this station on this band

Grey is the useful one: it answers "do I need this station?" at a glance. It is band-aware, so the same operator on a different band is not greyed out — that is a new band-slot.

Spots fade as they age. A spot is a claim about now, and an old one pointing at an empty frequency is worse than no spot at all:

Under 5 minutes old — full brightness
Around 15 minutes — about half faded
30 minutes — gone

The callsign and its line always fade together.

Off-screen counts. When there are spots on your band that fall outside the window you are looking at, a small count appears in the bottom corner of the spectrum — < spots (3) on the low side, spots (5) > on the high side. It says "spots" in words rather than a bare <3, because a lone number against the edge of the spectrum tells you neither what it counts nor that you can tap it. These are scoped to the band you are on, so the arrow never points at something on 40 m while you are on 20 m. Each is coloured like the spot it will take you to.

Crowded bands. Only so many callsigns fit legibly side by side, so on a busy segment the closest-spaced spots lose their name — and a spot with no name is not drawn at all, rather than leaving a line pointing at nothing. Stations you have not worked are labelled in preference to ones you have, and fresher spots in preference to older ones.

2. Tapping a spot¶

Tap a callsign and the radio tunes to it and switches mode:

Spot mode	Radio goes to
CW	CW
FT8, FT4, other data	DiGi
SSB	USB above 10 MHz, LSB below
Unknown	Frequency only — the mode is left alone

Bandwidth is deliberately not forced. The QMX keeps a filter per mode and loads it when the mode changes, so the right width follows by itself.

Tap an off-screen count (< spots (3) / spots (5) >) and you jump to the nearest spot on that side, which brings it into view. Those counts have a deliberately large touch area — the visible text is small, but the target around it is not.

Tapping the spectrum anywhere else still tunes normally, and pinch-zoom and the one-finger pan are unaffected. Only the callsigns themselves and the two counts are spot targets.

A callsign's target is the text, and nothing above or below it. That matters because a long callsign is a wide label sitting over the trace, and a click inside it goes to that station rather than to the frequency under your pointer. If a signal you want is behind a label, aim at the same column higher or lower in the spectrum and it tunes there normally.

In the browser, hovering a callsign shows you a marker at that station's real frequency with its name, so you can see where the click will take you before you commit. On the Tab5 the two gestures are already distinct: tuning to a point needs a brief hold, while a callsign is a quick tap.

3. Turning it on and off¶

Settings drawer (swipe in from the right edge) — Live spots section:

Control	Default	What it does
Live spots (POTA)	On	The whole feature. Off leaves the spectrum completely clean
Add RBN (CW skimmers)	Off	Adds RBN as a second source. Needs your callsign set
DX cluster spots	Off	Human-typed spots — the only source of SSB activity. A second connection, so opt-in
SOTA spots (summits)	Off	Summit activations from spothole.app, a volunteer-run server. Opt-in for that reason
Mode filter the spots	On	Shows only spots you can work in the mode you are in

Every one is saved and appears in the configuration file you can download and restore from the web UI, under [settings].

About the mode filter, since it is on by default and changes what you see: tapping a spot sets the mode as well as the frequency, so an unfiltered lane can drop a CW operator into FT8 without warning — which is exactly what happened to Michael KZ4LY, and why this exists. With it on, changing mode changes which spots are on screen, and the off-screen counts change with them. A spot whose mode is unknown is always shown, so nothing is hidden on a guess. Switch it off and every spot is shown, with a two-letter tag on the label (CW, SB, FT) telling you what tapping it will do — deliberately absent when the filter is on, because then every spot is already your mode.

The spots overlay belongs to the Panadapter page. It is not drawn on the FT8 screen.

4. About RBN¶

RBN is off by default, on purpose. It is a continuous global feed rather than an occasional fetch, and it arrives over a persistent connection on the part of this board that has historically been the most delicate. Off by default means it can never affect anyone who has not asked for it.

If you do switch it on:

Your callsign is required. The feed asks for one when connecting; it is how RBN attributes load, not a password. Set it under Callsign & Grid.
Only your current band is kept. RBN reports the whole world, and the display can only show one band at a time, so spots outside the band you are on are discarded as they arrive. Changing band clears the picture and it refills within a few seconds.
Duplicates are merged. The same CQ is typically reported by ten or more skimmers; you see one entry per station, at the best reported signal.
RBN spots are held for up to 10 minutes after any skimmer last heard them — shorter than the 30 minutes above, because an active caller is re-spotted every couple of minutes and silence means they have stopped.
It is the CW/RTTY skimmer feed. RBN runs a separate FT8/FT4 feed that the panadapter deliberately does not subscribe to — you are already decoding those yourself, far better, from the antenna.

5. About the DX cluster — where phone spots come from¶

RBN cannot show you an SSB station. It is a network of automated skimmers, and a skimmer decodes CW, RTTY, FT8 and FT4 — machine-readable modes. There is no such thing as an SSB skimmer, because no machine can recognise a callsign spoken into a microphone. So every phone station on the band is invisible to it.

A DX cluster is people typing. That is the whole difference, and it is why this exists as a third source:

Phone spots — SSB activity you cannot see any other way.
Park and summit references — a human writes POTA ES-2081 in the comment, so a cluster spot can also tag your chase in the log.
Everything else people bother to spot — DX, contest activity, anything worth telling other operators about.

Switch it on with DX cluster spots (phone), next to the other two sources in the settings drawer, or from the web UI. Like RBN it is off by default: it is a second continuous connection, and the same caution applies.

Things worth knowing:

Your callsign is required, for the same reason as RBN — the node asks for one to identify the connection.
Only your current band is kept, again like RBN.
Mode is worked out for you. Most cluster spots carry no mode field at all. If the spotter typed one (LSB, CW, FT8) it is used; otherwise the frequency is looked up in your band plan — 14.020 is CW, 14.285 is phone. The same inference you would make reading the line yourself.
Skimmer spots relayed onto the cluster are ignored. Some nodes forward RBN traffic; those entries would duplicate what RBN already gives you, so they are dropped rather than drawn twice.
Spots are held for up to 15 minutes — longer than RBN, because a human spot describes something slower-moving than a skimmer's automatic report.

!!! note "Not every node is equally busy" Cluster nodes vary enormously. In testing, one node produced two spots in four minutes while another produced seventy-five in fifteen. A quiet node looks exactly like a broken connection, so give it a few minutes before concluding anything.

6. About SOTA — summit activations¶

SOTA spots come from spothole.app, an aggregator run by Ian Renton M0TRT, used with his permission. That is worth knowing because it shapes how the Tab5 treats it:

Off by default, so nobody polls somebody else's hobby server without choosing to.
Fetched once every two minutes, which is plenty for activations that last an hour.
When it is unreachable, nothing happens. The spots already on screen stay until they age out normally — no banner, no error, nothing to dismiss. A volunteer server being down for an afternoon is an ordinary state, not a fault in your radio.

Almost every SOTA spot carries a portable suffix — EA2GM/P rather than EA2GM — because the operator is on a summit rather than at home. That is why the callsign shown is the one that was spotted, exactly as spotted.

SOTA is nearly all CW and SSB. Of a typical sample, none are in a digital mode. So a summit will rarely appear in your FT8 log; the value of the source is seeing where the activity is on the spectrum, and being able to tap it.

7. Refresh and timing¶

POTA is fetched about once a minute — spot rates on that service change on that sort of timescale, and the fetch briefly pauses the web UI's spectrum stream so the two never compete for the link.
RBN and the DX cluster arrive continuously and are merged into the display every 10 seconds.
Ageing is re-evaluated every second, so spots dim and disappear on their own even when nothing new arrives.

If spots never appear at all, check in this order: WiFi connected (bottom bar), Live spots switched on, and — for RBN only — a callsign set.