Ham Finder 2.2.12 Upgrading to Android Studio and Android 6+

I know recently I've been doing far more game development than Amateur Radio stuff, but I figured this deserved a blog post. I've been working on upgrading a lot of the internal guts to Ham Finder, specifically updating to the latest APIs. What this means is there should be prompts for permissions, for example. It should be more stable, and be overall faster. Here's what it took to do that:

1. Import in to Android Studio- When I last touched Ham Finder, it was built using Eclipse.
2. Update all of the API calls to the latest versions, getting from Gradle where possible.
3. Go through almost every file fixing issues that Android Studio detected. One of the most common issues has to do with preferences, these are now all done asynchronously, so it should be a bit faster. The same goes for maps, it should be somewhat smoother.
4. Update Spatialite- Spatialite is the core library that allows for the offline county, country, state, dxcc, etc testing. In upgrading the Android build, the old Spatialite stopped working. I was able to resolve this, with quite a bit of work.
5. I discovered a few minor issues along the way that were resolved.

 This sounds easy enough, but I actually spent quite a bit of time getting all of this to work right. The bottom line is, Ham Finder should run smoother than before. I did keep a list of a few issues I'd like to resolve that I found when working through it, but as you might have noticed, my unnamed Sea Trading Game is taking quite a bit of time. If I see enough interest, I will make some of these updates. In fact, part of the reason why I did this round of updates is because of generous purchasers buying upgrades over the last month. Thanks guys! If I see sales continue to climb, that will be a good sign that there is still interest in this product. That especially holds true if I see some of the more obscure in app purchases being bought, such as the French offline maps.

The new version should be released by August 1st, although it might take another week if I find some critical issue at the last minute. It is currently available for beta testing, which you can opt in to via this link.

A Trusted QSL library for Java

As long time blog readers are no doubt familiar, I do quite a bit of tinkering with Android. Ham Finder is written in Android. I have wanted for some time to have a way of uploading QSLs to Logbook of the World from Ham Finder, mostly because it makes mobile logging for LOTW go from extremely difficult to a snap.

For your information, here's what I've had to do to make this work in the past:

1. Divide up my QSOs by location where they were made.
2. Sign each of these with a custom created Station identification with Trusted QSL.
3. Upload each of them.

This was a royal pain, and I want to make all of this seamless, using Ham Finder. I think I've almost got all of the pieces figured out, and so here I present them:

1. The key piece to make this all work is a java library that runs Trusted QSL. I'm making this open sources, the code I have so far is available at GitHub.
2. Right now Ham Finder doesn't provide ITU zones, nor CQ Zones. I'm working on adding those features. It will be most difficult for those countries (Outside of the US) which have multiple CQ/ITU zones, but I'll get something to work most of the time for now.
3. Upload them to LOTW as needed, including corrections. This should be easy enough to manage, as all of the contacts are stored in a database already. It just involves making sure they are only sent once.

Trusted QSL is an open source bit of software written in C++. I wanted a natively coded bit of software, for a number of reasons, mostly because it's easier to maintain. I don't care about a lot of the functionality provided by Trusted QSL either, I just want to sign and upload them.

Through reading documentation, reverse engineering the TQ8 files, and even emailing the Trusted Qsl staff, I've learned a number of things. First of all, TQ8 files are GZipped files of the Global Amateur Interchange (GAbbI) file format. The latest specifications on LOTW can be found at Rick Murphy's website. In fact, there are a few key differences from the web site specification and what is actually used. The key differences are as follows:

1. All of the data for signing is upper case.
2. The order of fields for the signed data is: CA_PROVINCE, CQZ, GRIDSQUARE, IOTA, ITUZ, US_COUNTY, US_STATE, BAND, BAND_RX, CALL, FREQ, FREQ_RX, MODE, PROP_MODE, QSO_DATE, QSO_TIME, SAT_NAME. Note that station comes first, then QSO data. 
3. There are several undocumented fields, including CA_PROVINCE, US_STATE, SIGNDATA, and SIGN_LOTW_V1.0. SIGNDATA is the data signed for the LOTW signature, SIGN_LOTW_V1.0 is the LOTW signature itself. CA__PROVINCE and US_STATE are the Canadian Province and US state.
4. SIGN_LOTW_V1.0 has a :6 after the number of digits. I can't actually figure out what this means...
5. The max space per row is actually 64, not 72 as specified.
6. The character count includes line breaks, and if there is any line breaks, it also counts the last line break. For a single line, it doesn't count the final line break.
7. The signature format is SHA1withRSA.

As of right now, I have the library published, have had Logbook of the World accept it, and am working on integrating the library into Ham Finder. Hopefully it will work great!

Version 1.6 of Ham Finder

It's been a while since I've done an update on Ham Finder here, let me give you some basic. First of all, the app is doing great, thanks to all of you who have already downloaded it! There have been over 1000 downloads, which makes this competing for my most popular app of all time, and already I can tell you there's more actual users of Ham Finder than any other app I've developed. You guys rock!

Some features that have been released, in versions 1.3 to 1.5, include some call sign help, frequency monitoring, improved logbook, tablet versions, and in general I'm working towards ADIF exporting.

Version 1.6 will include the following:

1. Users can now specify their location, useful for those devices without a GPS.
2. Working on putting things on the map to indicate where you have been.
3. Improvements in how frequency is managed.

The next big version, I am excited to announce, will contain ADIF support! I should be able to export the log to ADIF format, and I'll work on other fun stuff as well!

Bottom line, the app's coming great, and I owe it all to my awesome audience! Thanks, and keep letting me know what you want!

Hamfinder 1.2 released!

I've recently done yet another significant upgrade to Ham Finder, and I thought I'd let you all in as to what's changed with the latest version, and give you a sneak peak as to what will be changing soon.

The biggest difference with the newest build is that I've started to work on the Log Book to make it more user friendly. It still has some work to be done, but it's definitely a step in the right direction compared to what it used to be.  The input dialog is still the same, just the user's call sign, frequency you made the contact, and a field for what you entered. Now compared to previous versions, you can actually see all of the fields entered. Also, there is now a tab selection mode, which will easily allow you to switch between the location and logbook, and any future mode which may exist.

Future versions will continue to improve on this. One of the features I'm working on right now will allow for user customization, including selecting which columns will appear, and in which order. In addition, the app will be better formatted for Tablets, as things are right now, it looks poor on a 7 inch tablet, and even worse on a 10 inch tablet. There was a major redesign in the code to allow for making a tablet version of the app easier.

Ham Finder 1.1 release!

I am excited to announce the release of Ham Finder 1.1. There's a lot of goodies in this new build, and I hope you'll find them as useful as I have!

The biggest new feature is the ability to buy add on products. For right now, there are just two available products, but I hope to have many of them available soon. The two ones now are a general upgrade to remove ads, and a complete offline database of all US counties. With the offline database, you can figure out what county you are in even without an internet connection!

There are also a lot of little features in this build, like improved Holo support, better popups, cleaner displays, and overall better performance. I really hope this will make an improvement in the lives of those who purchase it!

Ham Finder 1.0 release!

For the last few months, I've been working on a project, which I just released to the world today. I haven't wanted to say much about it until I managed to get it released, but as it's now out there, I figured I'd let it go!

The project is named Ham Finder. Essentially, it's aim is to be the ultimate tool to assist the mobile amateur radio operator. I have a whole bunch of things planned for it, but the tool itself is simple, and for the moment, focused on the US. That isn't to say that it won't work outside of the US, but functionality will be somewhat limited outside of the US for now.

Here's an example output of the tool. For the purpose of testing this, I spoofed the location to the White House. It shows the lat/long, grid square, county, and more.

For another example, see this view from Arlington. Note that it also gives the DXCC, the prefix (K4), and other relevant information.

For the future, as mentioned, I have quite a few planned upgrades. There isn't a whole lot that I'll commit to at this moment, but I will promise that shortly the capability will exist to get the data offline, and remove ads, for a small price. In addition, I'm hoping to improve the logging system considerable, and export to ADIF, and possible other formats as well.

If you could be kind and give me feedback on this app, I'd love to hear from you! I really am hoping to make this an awesome program, and I appreciate all of the help in knowing where to take it!