Hi there, I’ve been building a new program called Tiles on the Air (tilesontheair.com) and would like to request permission to use it as a trigger condition in HamAlert. Not sure if there is some sort of custom trigger that already exists that I could use for this.
Thank you
Facundo, KK4ODA
Hello Facundo,
HamAlert is currently receiving requests from various sources to add support for new, emerging outdoor/award programs. I suspect that Agentic Coding has been a major driving force behind this trend because it has lowered the technical barrier to entry.
While it’s nice to support everything (at least from the point of view of the concerned users), there are also disadvantages, like UI clutter, reference designator conflicts and maintenance issues. Sometimes there are even multiple (rival) programs for a given entity category. Each of them comes with their own reference structure, entity list and spotting platform, all using bespoke APIs.
I think before adding more of them, we need to define objective criteria for such programs to be supported by HamAlert, to avoid overloading the UI and codebase with niche things that are of interest only to a handful of users.
I’m still not sure which objective criteria to use when deciding whether adding a particular new program to HamAlert would be warranted. It will likely have to be a mix of maturity (e.g. been around for at least a year), user base (e.g. at least 1000 active users) and spot activity (e.g. at least 500 spots per month). Discussion welcome.
See also:
That said, the issue of adding a “Grid Square” condition (not related to any specific award program) comes up often, and I totally understand that. The challenge there is where to obtain accurate grid square information for a station even if the particular spot source (DX cluster etc.) does not provide it. See also:
73,
Manuel HB9DQM
Hi Manuel,
Thank you for your honest reply and for sharing where HamAlert stands with all these new outdoor programs coming up. I completely understand your concern. If you try to integrate every single one by hand, you’ll eventually hit a wall, and I see why you’d want to avoid that.
Before we get into the details about criteria, I want to share another way of looking at it. Right now, integrating each program means you have to learn every new API, reference format, entity list, and UI. With how easy it is to launch new programs these days, that approach just won’t scale, no matter how careful you are about which ones you accept. What would really help is if there was a way to accept ‘on the air’ spots in a standard way, so adding a new program is just a matter of updating a registry, not changing your code every time.
Here’s an idea: what if there was a single open spot format that any program could use, published at a known URL? Each spot could use namespaced references, like POTA:K-1234 or TOTA:EM73wt, so there’s no confusion. Every spot would include grid and lat/lon fields. Then, a central JSON registry could list all the programs, with a tier system (1 for established, 2 for emerging, 3 for experimental), so you can group them easily in the UI and hide the less-used ones by default.
There are a couple of extra benefits to this approach:
First, your concern about having clear criteria changes a bit. If a program is just in the registry, you don’t have to update HamAlert’s code for each one, so you can include new programs without worrying about extra maintenance. The tier system also lets you highlight the more established ones as they grow.
Second, the Grid Square trigger you mentioned comes for free. Any spot from any program that includes a grid can be filtered by grid, no matter where it comes from. I know that’s one of the most requested features for HamAlert, and this way, you get it without having to write extra code for each program.
If you want to try this out, I’m more than happy to help.
No rush at all. Just let me know if you think this is something worth exploring.
Thanks again for everything you do with HamAlert. A lot of us really depend on it.
Facundo
KK4ODA
Tiles on the Air