🚀 Enhanced Features Guide
A detailed guide to the advanced monitoring, analytics and notification features. Each explains what it does, where to find it, and how to read it.
📶 Propagation Range
Where: Top header bar, next to the station count (hidden on narrow mobile screens — use the Mobile site there).
A 10-segment bar showing how many stations are currently heard at each distance from your own station (the location set in Settings / the connect form). Each segment is one distance band in miles:
0-5 5-10 10-20 20-40 40-80 80-160 160-200 200-500 500-1000 1000+
- Segment colour = stations heard in that band right now: grey = none, blue = 1, green = 2-3, yellow = 4-7, orange = 8+.
- LOW / MED / HIGH label = the furthest band with at least two stations heard. LOW = nothing meaningful beyond 40 mi, MED = 40-200 mi, HIGH = 200 mi or further.
Note: this server is internet-connected (APRS-IS), so "stations heard" includes traffic gated in from elsewhere — it shows your effective visibility radius on the network, not literal RF propagation. Stations with invalid (0,0 or out-of-range) coordinates are excluded. Hover the bar for a per-band breakdown.
📡 High Activity Alert
Where: A green banner that slides down from the very top of the page.
Fires automatically when network traffic spikes to an unusually busy level (an internal activity score above 80/100, based on packets-per-minute over the last 10 minutes) — a heads-up that something is happening on the network worth looking at. It auto-hides after 30 seconds, can be dismissed with the ✕, has a 30-minute cooldown so it never spams, and is silenced (banner still shows, but no beep) during your Quiet Hours.
📡 Range Lines (to you)
Where: Sidebar checkbox (left panel, under the station filters).
When enabled, draws a dashed line from every recently-heard station to your own station (the location set in Settings / the connect form) — showing how far your gateway's effective reach currently extends. This does not show RF paths between other stations — over an internet-fed APRS-IS connection there is no way to know who heard whom over the air. Lines are colour-coded by distance:
- Green — within 10 mi (local)
- Lime — 10-40 mi (nearby)
- Yellow — 40-160 mi (regional)
- Orange — 160-500 mi (distant)
- Purple — over 500 mi (DX / long distance)
Hover any line to see the callsign and exact distance in miles/km. Stations with invalid (0,0 or out-of-range) coordinates are excluded. Lines refresh automatically every 30 seconds.
📈 Propagation Analytics
Where: The 🏆 Board panel (header button) — scroll to the "Propagation Analytics" card. It auto-loads when you open the panel; press 🔄 Refresh to recompute.
Four analytics views computed from the server's stored packet history:
- Best Time of Day — a 24-bar histogram showing which hours of the day have the most packet traffic. The peak hour is highlighted. Helps identify when the network is most active.
- 7-Day Activity Heatmap — a day × hour colour grid. Darker/brighter indigo cells mean more packets in that hour. Hover any cell for the exact count. Spot daily and weekly patterns at a glance.
- Longest RF Paths — a ranking of the stations heard via the most digipeater hops. A high hop count means the packet travelled through many relays to reach the gateway.
- Station Reliability Grades — every station graded A–F based on how consistently it transmits. An A-grade station beacons regularly over a long period; an F-grade one was heard only briefly or erratically. The table shows packet count, time span, and average gap between packets.
🌧 Weather Radar Overlay
Where: Sidebar checkbox (left panel, under the station filters).
Overlays animated rain-radar imagery on the map, sourced from RainViewer (global coverage, no setup needed). The radar loops through the last couple of hours plus a short forecast, updating every 0.6 seconds. Semi-transparent so station markers stay visible on top. Toggle off when you don't need it to keep the map clean.
⚠ UK Severe Weather Warnings
Where: A coloured banner at the very top of the page (appears only when a warning is active).
Shows live UK National Severe Weather Warnings from the Met Office. The banner colour matches the warning severity: 🟡 Yellow, 🟠 Amber, 🔴 Red. The most severe active warning is shown. Dismiss with the ✕ — it won't reappear unless a genuinely new warning is issued. Checked every 15 minutes. This works with no setup; an optional Met Office DataHub API key (Admin panel) is only needed for future detailed-forecast features.
↩ Click-to-Reply
Where: The Messages panel.
Any APRS message you receive shows the sender's callsign as a clickable button. Tap it and the "To" field is instantly filled with that callsign, the Messages panel opens, and the cursor jumps to the message box — so you can reply in seconds without retyping the callsign.
🔍 Auto-Fit Zoom & 👻 Station Ghosting
Where: Sidebar checkboxes (left panel, under the station filters).
Auto-Fit Zoom — when on, the map automatically zooms and pans so every visible station fits on screen. As soon as you manually pan or zoom, it switches itself off so you stay in control.
Station Ghosting (on by default) — stations not heard for 30+ minutes gradually fade out and gain a pulsing dashed ring, so you can instantly tell fresh stations from stale ones. The older a station, the more transparent it becomes. A new packet snaps it back to full brightness.
📬 Message Notifications & 🌙 Quiet Hours
Where: Notifications appear automatically; Quiet Hours is set in your Member account → Settings tab.
Logged-in members get notified about APRS messages: a prominent toast on login if messages arrived while you were away, a live toast when a new message comes in, a desktop browser notification if the tab is in the background, plus a red count badge on the member button.
Quiet Hours — set a start and end time (e.g. 22:00–07:00) to silence notification toasts and beeps overnight. The count badge still updates quietly, so nothing is missed — it just won't make noise. Handles windows that cross midnight.
📨 Offline Message Delivery
Where: Automatic — no setup beyond having a member account.
If someone sends an APRS message to your callsign while you're offline, the server stores it. The moment any client logs in with your callsign — the web messenger, APRSDroid, a radio, anything — the queued messages are delivered to it as normal APRS packets. Messages survive until you collect them.
📱 Mobile Companion Site
Where: Visit /mobile on your phone, or use the "📱 Mobile" link in the footer.
A touch-optimised version of the site with a native-app-style bottom tab bar: Map (full-screen live map), Stations (searchable list — tap to locate), Messages (recent APRS messages), and Status (network activity and server stats). It uses the same live data feed as the desktop site but with a stripped-down, thumb-friendly layout.
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