News and Info: July 2025

I’ve refactored the frontend Javascript into more modern code. It was kind of old style and hard to follow before and I’ve learned a lot since I wrote it originally. It’s also been updated to the latest Google Maps components which needed a few code changes.

Nothing much has changed for the end user but I did make a few tweaks along the way.

• When a location marker has multiple stations at that location, the callsign shown on the marker is the first on the list which is displayed in the popup when you click on the marker. They are now sorted by license class with the higher classes at the top. e.g., Extra comes before General. This is an attempt at making the callsign on the marker be the most likely active ham. I know it’s making an unproven sweeping assumption but if there is an extra and a technician class at the same address, I think the chances are pretty good that the extra is likely to be the most active and have the more recognizable callsign.
• I’ve made some attempt at cleaning up multiple addresses at the same location and therefore shown on the same popup. Some addresses in the FCC data are in all upper case letters and some are in nicer proper case. When there are two or more hams at a location with both types of addresses, they were listed as multiple different addresses. It now detects this and shows only the proper case version.
• It normalizes the common abbreviations so “Street” becomes “St” etc when they are at the end of the address line.
• The popup only shows 5 digit zip codes.

Those last three enhancements will hopefully make many multi-ham popups smaller by eliminating a lot of multiple “different” addresses which are really the same. There are still plenty that at first sight look like duplicates but if you look closely they always have a minor variation. It’s often a spelling typo.

73
Ross KT1F