WSPR Watch iOS App now transmits

A bit of feedback from some WSPR Watch users has prompted a bit of work on the app. Recent updates have added and then improved the graphing of the number of spots per block of time - which I think is a fair way to show the rise and fall in propagation, then colours to show bands on not only the graphs but also on the arcs on the map.

Spurred on by recent success transmitting WSPR with a simple Arduino and Si5351 clock generator, I've done the work to generate the needed audio right in the app.

Tests here have shown that simple acoustic coupling from the phone to the mic of an SSB transmitter is enough to be spotted at great distance.

The new transmit feature also has a few goodies:

• Figures out your maidenhead locator by using the phone's location services.
• Uses the phone's time sync to start the transmission on time.

There's more to be done but this is a good start. To generate the audio, I used the fabulous AudioKit framework. Symbol generation code was copied from the GPL2 WsprryPi project. (I love how swift can so simply call C functions just by making a bridging header).

WSPR Watch 3.2.6 is now available and I hope you find it useful.

Update 3.2.6 had a bug that led to an intermittent crash. Update to 3.2.7 or later to get over that. I'd like to add that the new band colours in both the graph and map views look great.

The crash was interesting, it wasn't clear what was crashing, somewhere deep in framework c++ code. In the end it turned out that my table of band frequency edges hadn't got 60m correct for all parts of the world and if I got a frequency I didn't expect I'd try to set the colour of an attributed string to an illegal colour. It didn't crash right away though. Thanks to those who reported the issue.