I had seen in my Polo test week that the spotting field always starts blank with the “QRV” or “QSY” default, but my own spotting text is deleted, so that I have to re-enter it, as long as I wish to submit it together with the spots.
Is there something provided by the code to keep my individual spotting text available again and again through an operation? I simply liked so far in SOTLAS that I can mention my name and the outdoor equipment. SOTLAS keeps that in a memory, even on other days or after a restart of the cell phone.
Atm there is no facility to save spot comments.
I just stick to qrv and qsy for the most part. At least in POTA for most people spot history is not visible and only the last spot is seen. For other spotting resources i know this is not the case. Perhaps there will be a spot comment save feature.
Alan
I see in SOTA that most people like to use the comments. It is easier there in SOTAwatch or SOTLAS to oversee the comments on their spotting pages, contrary to e.g. the POTA spotting page. When it is made easier to operate resp. vary the content of the “Comments” field, people would certainly use it more.
An idea could be to offer selection buttons in an additional line above the existing spotting line seen after tapping the “Self-Spotting” button. A possible solution could look like this:
3 to 4 buttons to select individual (presaved) comments;
a button to jump to the settings page or a popup window for the maintenance of these individual comment text conserves.
Hitting one of these buttons would load the underlying text string into the input box. As usual, the next step would be to hit the “Spot at …” button to send it to all activated spotting facilities.
The maintenance elements for the individual comments (“Spot settings”) could be placed on a subpage or a further section of the logger settings. These texts should be saved with the constants of the app so as not to loose them when the phone or tablet is turned off - like other settings of the app - to have them back after restarting the app.
The standard behavior for the next spot should be to offer exactly the last spot again to repeat it. However, each selected text in the input box should be editable to finally add a last word or to delete one as an exception.
Is there a limitation from the POTA API (resp. SOTA, WWFF, GMA or other available spotting facilities) regarding the length of the “Comments” field?
Would appreciate such an enhancement and consider it useful!
An enhancement to these buttons #1…#4 could be to reserve one of these to write into the spotting comment field the activated references. That is common here when activating on different programs like e.g. 1 SOTA + 1 WWFF + 2 POTA: “QRV on SOTA HB/XY-123, WWFF HBFF-9999, POTA CH-1111 + CH-2222” (or similar).
And a further idea: offer the use of variables of the operation and system constants for such text conserves like the currently activated references or the operator name with callsign. Maybe such can make sense here.
I have some ideas on how to expand spotting features, and also “macro” buttons like the ones you propose.
It is, however, a significant UI effort. Not so much the code to put the buttons on the screen, but the part that allows the user to define and configure these buttons.
As we add CAT control and other features, these macro buttons will become more important, so I’ll have to tackle this problem soon.
It’s amazing for me to see how the application still runs smoothly on my older iPhone 12 despite all enhancements and doesn’t drain the battery - taking pictures during the activations is worse for the battery, hi.
