A modern site, showcasing DX QSOs between amateur radio stations. Using a connection to a DXCluster for real-time display of incoming spots.

Amateur radio has a huge lack of modern open source projects supporting it, and I'm hoping this can be one of the first large projects that starts changing that.

This site is currently being hosted on Heroku at dxspot.herokuapp.com for the front end (Please be patient for the first load to happen!), and sleepy-lowlands-69004 for the back end, which also provides an open API and connectable socket for others wishing to use this data.

This site was written entirely using JavaScript and JSX. The front end is React based and connects to the Express based back end.

Additionally, I wrote two NPM modules to modularize the code and give back some to the open source community. These modules are:

• dxcluster - This module is responsible for the connection to the dxcluster server over Telnet. It opens and keeps the connection while emitting events when an incoming spot is seen. I'm hoping to cover some more edge cases here in continuing development.
• DXCCjs - This module is responsible for determining the DXCC information of a given amateur radio callsign. Using a database provided by G7VJR from ClubLog for the initial lookup, and an API provided by CallLook.info for the more specific USA information. Currently pretty buggy, but able to pull the correct information 90+% of the time.

Specific libraries/technologies that have been helpful on the front end include:

• Redux - keeping track of global state, and abstracting out the socket logic to its own action file
• Semantic-UI - Quick and very easy to use UI generation
• Socket.io - Providing a realtime connection to my back end and allowing for spots to be sent to the UI in real time
• Google Maps - Allowing me to display the distance between two DXCC stations
• Lodash - providing a simple way to dedupe an array
• Luxon - providing an easy to use DataTime management/formatting object

Specific libraries/technologies that have been helpful on the back end include:

• DXCCjs
• DXCluster
• Express - Static endpoint listening and controlling
• Mongoose - Connection to my mongo database where spots are being stored
• Socket.io - the other end of my socket logic

In preparing this for a presentation for my General Assembly project, many URLs are still hard coded, but will be moved to more generic forms in the following weeks.

Both front end and back end repositories are set up such that they should be able to be deployed to Heroku or whatever other hosting platform you have with ease. The back end requires Mongo is running, I used the mLab addon for this.

For Google Maps to work, you will have to provide your own key to the front end's src/config.js file.

This project has gained some interest in the amateur radio community and I intend to continue development. The following features/changes are on my short list:

• Code cleanup
• Filters
• Search
• Additional QSO information (from other third party API sources)

• Justin, Tine, and the rest of the SF WDI 45 class for always being supportive and interested.
• ghardin137 from Reactiflux on Discord who quickly identified why my container wasn't updating (state mutation problem)
• #redditNet on IRC and /r/amateurradio for providing feedback on my libraries and final project