Three amateur-radio operating aids

Evidence you can judge, before you key up.

dalDesk, dalMap, and dalSDR each answer a different operating question, and all three answer it the same way: they tell you where a piece of information came from, how old it is, and what it does not prove. dalDesk is being retired, and dalMap now answers what it answered. They are free for operators, clubs, and groups.

Start wherever your question is

They overlap deliberately and are not interchangeable. If you want to see what is happening right now and where, or to work out what to do from your own station, start with dalMap. If you want to hear what is actually on the air in front of you, start with dalSDR. dalDesk answered the first of those questions and is being retired into dalMap; it still runs and its guide still applies, so an operator using it today keeps what they have, but a station starting today should not start there. Each guide opens with a first session that takes a few minutes.

Nothing here needs an account to look at, and none of the three publishes your station or your location as a side effect of using it. Where a product keeps something — a callsign, a grid square, a saved view — its guide says so, says where it is kept, and says how to remove it.

None of them asks who you are in order to answer. What a tool measuring from your station needs is a place to measure from, so that is what it asks for: a Maidenhead grid square, entered directly. A callsign is one way to arrive at one and never the only way, and a product that offers to work a square out from your network address fills it in for you to check rather than using it — an address-derived square can be wrong by a wide margin, and it names the party it asked. A callsign is asked for where you are the subject: a tool reporting on your own station rather than from it, at the point you open it.

What they share

An operator who moves between them should not have to relearn anything. The three hold one standard for how they treat you, and it comes down to two commitments.

• You are told what you are looking at. Source, freshness, transformation, uncertainty, limitation, and license, for anything a product shows you — so the judgment stays yours.
• A live observation is not a promise. None of these establishes audibility, station availability, permission to transmit, a band opening, coverage, safety conditions, or that a contact will happen. They are evidence for a decision, not the decision.
• A status color means one thing. The same colors, the same words, and the same shape of warning in all three, so moving between them costs you nothing.
• Your appearance and text-size settings are honored. Light, dark, and system appearance everywhere, and text that scales with your browser's font size rather than ignoring it.

You are welcome to use them

Use them. Open any of the three and use it. No account, no fee, no permission needed.

Point people at them. Put a link in a club newsletter, on a club site, in a training pack, on a slide, or on a QR code at a meeting. Linking needs no permission and has no limit — and sending someone a link rather than a copy means they arrive at the current version.

Show them. Run one on a screen where people can see it: a club meeting, a library, a classroom, a hamfest, a field day tent, a museum or maker space. Use it as a learning tool or a visual aid, for an audience of three or three hundred.

Refer to them. Cite them, screenshot them, write about them, teach from them.

All of that holds as long as nobody is making money from it. Commercial use, automated or bulk extraction, and derivative works are withheld — the license says exactly where the line is and how to ask about anything beyond it. Each product also carries its own license for its own code and data, linked from its card above.