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2D Map

The 2D map is a full-screen interactive map that plots live ham radio spots and activations on a flat projection. It's the fastest way to scan activity in your region or anywhere in the world.

Getting Around the Map​

The map works the way you'd expect from any modern mapping app:

  1. Pan -- Drag to move around the map. In embedded touch views, such as the Logbook folder map, one-finger swipe scrolls the surrounding panel; use two fingers to pan the map. Every map using this mode keeps a Use two fingers to drag the map reminder in its bottom-left corner.
  2. Zoom -- Pinch on mobile or scroll on desktop to zoom in and out. You can also use the zoom buttons on the map controls pill at the bottom of the view.
  3. Recenter -- Tap the target icon between the zoom buttons on the map controls pill to jump back to the current map anchor. In hunting/logbook maps that is your station; during an ongoing activation it is the activation park.
  4. Tap a marker -- On a hover device, clicking a marker with one activator opens that activator's details directly. When two or more activators share a park marker, hovering previews — and clicking or tapping pins — a layered carousel of regular spot popups, one per operator. Each live POTA or DX popup is one straight-sided card. It leads with the callsign and the operator's first name, then one place line: the activator's location when known on POTA cards, or the canonical entity title, prefixed by its parent-country flag when available, on DX cards. A grouped DX carousel shows that entity line once inside the front card, above the station content, which repeats no place. Below a divider, a segmented frequency readout sits with plain mode text to its right. Both continue with status controls, show a band-plan warning when applicable, and carry a small, dim details icon (a box with an arrow leaving it) in the card's top-right corner. Catalog park pins in Hunt, Activate setup, and Park Explorer use the same straight 300px card, left-aligned title, and corner details icon; a mouse click still opens details directly, while touch pins the card first. Where several parks or repeaters share one coordinate, that single pin carries a small count and opens the same layered carousel — see When Pins Land on the Same Spot. Selecting a park also marks its activator rows in the list beside the map — every activator on that park, since a selection names the park rather than one operator. See Finding Live Activations for the full interaction. The DX Chasing map works the same way, and its card opens the country detail view instead of a park. On the Repeaters map a marker is a repeater rather than an operator: its straight card leads with the callsign and locality, keeps the segmented output-frequency readout and mode below the divider, and carries no status controls or details icon because there is no repeater detail page — and no logging button either. When a connected radio supports the repeater, each card offers a tune button, including cards in a shared-coordinate carousel. Tuning remains available during an activation. No map popup has a corner X: hover previews disappear when you leave the marker/card, and pinned popups begin closing the moment you press empty map space — even if that press turns into a drag. Clicking a marker that already owns a hover preview pins that existing card without closing and reopening it; moving far enough to drag still dismisses the preview. Choosing another marker or pressing Escape on a keyboard closes them too. While a popup stays pinned, unrelated markers fade away so the chosen subject stays clear, and return when it closes. On a POTA activation-detail spotter map, selecting a spotter keeps the activator's gray park pin visible too. On a Logbook folder map, selecting a contact also keeps the resolved You pin that owns that QSO. Hovering over a marker on a desktop only dims its neighbors a little; the full fade belongs to pinned popups.
  5. Hover over a Hunting marker -- On wide screens, hovering over a marker on any Hunting map highlights its matching list item and scrolls that item into view by default. Turn off Settings > Preferences > Map > Auto-scroll activator list to keep the list still without turning off the matching highlight.

Live POTA and DX cards also show a quiet report-age line, such as 4m ago, beneath the identity/place lines and above the frequency. It describes the report currently shown in the card and appears when that report includes a time.

For actionable live POTA, DX, and catalog-park cards, the place's photos can appear as a small stack at the card's right edge, beside the callsign or park name, each visible layer showing a different photo. A pinned card loads them itself. A hover preview starts no photo lookup of its own, so it shows the stack only when the photos have already loaded — from an opened Hunt list row, a Park Explorer row, or another view. When several activators share a park, that shared place-photo stack appears beside the identity on the current front card as you move through the carousel.

Live POTA popups also include a Spot button to spot that activator on POTA.app, until Contacted becomes that station's status and the button leaves the popup. It shares the callsign requirement and five-minute wait with the hunting list and activation detail modal. See Spotting an activator.

Live POTA popups can also show New park for parks you haven't hunted when Show new park badges is enabled in your POTA connection settings.

Across those popup types, the content keeps its program-specific hierarchy inside one radio-instrument surface with a crisp metallic bezel and restrained depth. Grouped markers keep any shared heading inside the front card, above its station content. Tap or click anywhere on a detail-capable card — including its cached photo stack — or its corner icon to open the detail modal. Spot, status, contact, tuning, and help controls keep their own actions. In a grouped carousel, the front station card carries its own corner icon. The icon turns yellow when you hover over it, and keyboard users can Tab to it; screen readers announce it as see details. Stacked List View covers the same behavior from the list side.

The map is locked to a north-up orientation -- rotation is disabled to keep the view consistent.

[SCREENSHOT: 2D map with activity markers and a spot detail popup]

What the Map Shows​

In the Parks on the Air tab, the map renders live POTA activations as individual park markers. Marker color reflects the activation's status — default activator, hunted (contacted), attempted, or marked for retry.

The DX Chasing tab has its own map on the same layout, showing live DX cluster spots. A DX marker pins at its DXCC entity's map centroid rather than the station's address — the cluster reports who and where in the world, not a street address — so that map reads as a propagation picture. Status colors and opening details from a popup card behave identically.

The Repeaters tab uses the same map for something different: not spots, but repeaters — and not just the nearby ones. The map carries the whole directory: zoomed out, repeaters gather into cluster bubbles sized by how many they hold (tap one and the map zooms in until it splits, the same way the Park Explorer unpacks parks), and close in every repeater stands at its own published location — where several repeaters share one point, a single pin stands there wearing a count of how many, and its popup offers a carousel card for each of them (see When Pins Land on the Same Spot). Hovering a pin names the repeater — callsign, output frequency, mode, and its offset · tone line. Because nobody is transmitting on a directory entry, those pins carry no hunted/attempted/retry colors and no status controls — tapping one opens the repeater's details (offset, access tone, mode). When the directory's coordinate is a town center, a converted grid square, or a rounded-off number rather than the tower's own site, the card adds one quiet Approximate line, so a pin that's a mile out never reads as surveyed. The 20-mile ring belongs to the list beside the map; widening the search to 150 miles refills the list, while the map always shows everything. See Repeaters.

When several activators share a park, they stay on one park marker with an activator-count badge because they have the same coordinates. That shared-park marker does not split as you zoom; its popup offers one regular operator card per activator in the carousel.

The same MapView component is reused elsewhere in the app to plot your logged QSOs (in the Logbook tab and folder detail views) with great-circle arc lines from your station to each contact, show logged-contact arcs during ongoing activations, and draw spotter arcs inside POTA detail maps. Those views are covered in their own sections of the docs.

Marker Clustering​

When you're zoomed out to a wide view, Hamtrax groups nearby spots into clusters. Each cluster displays a number showing how many spots it contains.

  • Zoom in to break clusters apart and see individual markers.
  • Tap a cluster to zoom into that area and expand it.

As you zoom in further, clusters dissolve into individual spot markers that you can tap for details.

tip

If you're looking for activity in a specific area, zoom in first. Clustering keeps the map clean at wide zoom levels, but the spots are all still there once you get closer.

When Pins Land on the Same Spot​

Clustering pulls apart markers that are near each other. It can do nothing about markers that sit on the exact same coordinate — a club's 2m and 70cm repeaters on one tower, two parks published at the same point, two contacts whose locations resolve to the same place. Those are zero distance apart at every zoom level, so no amount of zooming in would ever separate them, and only the pin drawn last would respond when you tapped it or hovered over it.

The directory maps keep everything published at one coordinate on a single pin wearing a small number — how many repeaters or parks share it. A pin with only one entry carries no number at all. Hover over the numbered pin, or click or tap it, and its popup opens a layered carousel: one complete card is at the front, with the other cards tucked behind and underneath it. Scroll over the carousel or swipe it on touch to bring another card forward. A vertical stack of pill indicators runs along the carousel's right edge, dividing its full height among the available cards, with the current card's pill highlighted. Each front card keeps its own details and actions — a repeater's frequency, mode, callsign, offset, tone, and town; a park's identity and details link. The pin stays exactly where the directory published it, and every entry at that spot remains reachable without a tall popup covering the map.

The same carousel is used throughout the hunting maps whenever one glyph opens several cards, including live POTA activators at a shared park and grouped DX stations. As you move between cards, the exposed layers underneath shift up or down with your scrolling direction, then settle into place. Reduced motion keeps those layers still. Only the front card's controls act; bring another card forward to work with that entry. A marker with one card keeps its usual popup and actions.

Logbook maps are the deliberate exception. A contact and the You pin that worked it are the two ends of one path, so both have to stay visible even when they resolve to the same place — an arc that begins and ends inside a single glyph tells you nothing. There, and on the live spot pins, Hamtrax still fans them out: pins that would land on top of each other spread onto a small ring around the point they share, each drawing a thin line back to where it really is, and each answering a hover or a tap on its own. Tapping one fades the rest of the fan away, selecting one still flies the camera to its real location, and QSO arcs still start and end on true coordinates. Two limits keep that honest:

  • It only happens close in. A fanned pin is never allowed to sit more than about 5 km from its true coordinate, so at wide zoom levels the fan simply doesn't happen and nothing moves at all — a map that opens on a world view, like the Parks on the Air hunt map, looks exactly as it always has.
  • A pile too big to fan keeps a count instead. When more markers share a point than a ring can honestly hold, one pin stays on the true coordinate wearing a number: how many are still stacked underneath it. Zoom in further, or use the list beside the map, which is always the exhaustive one.

Day/Night Overlay​

The map displays a real-time day/night shadow showing where it's currently dark around the world. A faint twilight band around the terminator marks the gray-line zone, where HF propagation is often enhanced.

[SCREENSHOT: 2D map showing day/night terminator overlay]

info

The gray-line band is the area between 84 and 96 degrees of angular distance from the subsolar point. It updates every minute as the Earth rotates.

Reception Footprint (PSK Reporter)​

On the POTA hunting map, a small PSK button on the controls pill toggles your reception footprint -- the stations that have reported hearing you in the last 30 minutes, sourced from PSK Reporter. It's a quick way to confirm your signal is actually getting out, and roughly where, instead of guessing and hoping.

  • Turn it on and Hamtrax immediately plots every receiver that heard your callsign as a red dot, then quietly refreshes every few minutes while it stays on.
  • A thin bar above the toggle fills as the next refresh approaches -- empty just after an update, full when the next one is due -- so you can see at a glance how fresh the footprint is.
  • Signed out, tapping it opens a sign-up prompt with a preview of the footprint. Signed in, the toggle is disabled until you've saved a callsign in Settings -- a tooltip explains why.
  • The dots are a read-only overlay; they never touch your log.

Reception data comes from PSK Reporter. For a focused check with an editable callsign, a receiver list, and an explicit five-minute refresh timer, open the full-page PSK Reporter tool.

[SCREENSHOT: POTA hunting map with the PSK Reporter reception footprint toggled on]

Filtering Spots​

You can narrow down what appears on the map using the hunt filters:

  1. Open the Parks on the Air tab (or DX Chasing for cluster spots) — the tab you are in is the active dataset.
  2. Use the band and mode filters in the panel to refine further.

Map Tile Layer​

At low zoom levels, Hamtrax uses its own map style, designed to make the colored activity markers stand out. It follows your Appearance setting, dark or light, and recolors in place when you switch. The map is built on MapLibre GL and renders country and regional boundaries for geographic context.

Major city names are shown on this overview map by default. Hamtrax begins with cities above 10 million people, then lowers the population threshold as you zoom in. A small dot anchors every displayed name at the city's coordinates; MapLibre hides the dot with its name whenever labels overlap. Turn them off under Settings > Preferences > Map > Major city names.

When you zoom in past a threshold, the map crossfades to an OpenStreetMap raster layer that provides street-level detail. The transition is smooth. The street layer follows your Appearance setting too, toned to sit close to the overview map with parks still faintly green, and it recolors in place when you switch. Connection arcs and cluster bubbles look the same at every zoom.

When the map takes longer to load​

On the public Hunt, Activate, DX, and Repeaters tabs, Hamtrax shows a small status card if the map has not settled within five seconds. The map keeps loading behind the card. It disappears as soon as the map is ready, or you can choose Refresh page to try the load again.

tip

Spot markers, clusters, and the day/night overlay are tuned to stay clearly visible on both the dark and the light map.

Map Controls Pill​

A floating pill at the bottom-center of the map gives you quick access to the most common map actions:

  • Zoom in / Zoom out -- Step the zoom level up or down one increment at a time.
  • Recenter -- The target button between the two zoom controls jumps the view back to the current map anchor. It's disabled when you're already centered.
  • PSK (POTA hunting map only) -- Toggle your PSK Reporter reception footprint on or off. It needs an account with a saved callsign. See Reception Footprint below.
  • Center location (POTA hunting map only) -- Tap the pin control to drop a pink center pin and reveal the live location under the middle of the map. The expanded badge reminds you to drag the pink pin to see location, and shows two readings of that point -- its coordinates and its Maidenhead grid square -- each with its own copy button. Copying either one briefly changes that line to Copied, then collapses the badge back to the hidden state.

The pill floats over the map and stays out of the way of markers and popups.

Connection Lines​

QSO Arcs (Logbook and activation maps)​

When viewing your logged QSOs on the map (in the Logbook tab and folder detail views), Hamtrax draws great-circle arc lines between your station and each contact's location. These lines show the signal path of each QSO. Tap any line to see the contact details. A contact's popup starts with the callsign and the operator's first name, followed by the available park or activity name, reference and place, and date and time. Frequency and mode appear below a divider when logged. When shown, the country flag sits immediately before the country name on the place line. Contacts confirmed in LoTW also show a small LoTW badge beneath the radio readout. When Hamtrax can resolve where you operated from for that QSO, pinning the contact keeps its marker, the matching You pin, their arc, and the complete popup in the tightest safe frame. Every other pin and arc fades away. Closing the popup restores the same full-folder contact-and-operator overview used when the map opened. Your station location is resolved from the QSO's stored coordinates first, then from a safely recognized MY activity reference, and finally from the guarded folder origin when that view supplies one. Unknown or contradictory activity data contributes no catalog location and never invents an origin pair.

During an ongoing POTA activation, logged contact markers also draw QSO arcs back to the activation park anchor. That same park anchor owns the self/user glyph, initial camera, and recenter target. Spotter-only markers stay marker-only until they become logged contacts.

User Location Marker​

On the hunting map, Hamtrax shows your station location as a user-location pin when your preferences resolve to device GPS, manual coordinates, or callsign-based lookup. In logbook maps, Hamtrax may instead show one or more "You" operator pins using the same guarded location order described above. Each logged QSO keeps its own program-qualified pin and popup presentation, so identical reference text from different programs does not merge names or styling; unresolved references use the neutral contact pin. During an ongoing activation, the self/user glyph moves to the activation park. Read-only activator detail maps show the activator's pin instead of your self pin. Hover over that pin for the same rich identity popup the spotter markers use, and click it to pin the popup open. Until the activator's callsign lookup resolves, the pin keeps a plain callsign label.

State Boundaries and Country Shading​

US state boundaries are drawn on Hamtrax's maps for additional geographic context.

Looking for the world map of every country you've worked? That lives on your profile's DX Chasing showcase card. Logbook and folder maps deliberately don't shade countries — each one stays scoped to the contacts it's showing, so a folder's map tells only that folder's story.

Activation Setup Mode​

Before you start a POTA activation, a Select a Park hint pill animates above the map until a park is chosen. Opening setup does not request your location. Tap Find Nearest to request a fresh device location and save it to your shared location preferences. If the My park field is blank, Hamtrax auto-selects the closest park only when you're within 0.5 miles; otherwise it opens the nearby-parks list so you can choose. A lookup that stalls gives up after about twenty seconds rather than sitting on Finding…, and the button returns as took too long · Search again. Manual park search remains available if you deny location permission. A mouse click on a setup-map park opens its details directly; a touch tap pins the shared straight card first, then tapping anywhere on that card, or its corner icon, continues. The self-location glyph starts at your known Hamtrax location; selecting a recognized park slides it to the park's resolved location with slow-fast-slow motion and two radiant omnicolor beams on each of its north, east, south, and west axes. Only after the glyph arrives does the camera fly to the map's closest supported zoom. When only a grid square is available, the resolved preview uses that grid's center. At the destination, the self glyph becomes the single interactive park pin instead of covering a second target. Clearing the My park field slides it back first, then the camera returns home at the normal overview zoom. Your saved location never changes, and Reduce Motion completes the glyph phase immediately before the camera snaps without beams. The park-selector and frequency inputs each show a soft shimmering perimeter that fades once you fill them in -- a visual cue pointing you to the next field. The Hunt tab's Hunting from a park? setup uses the same explicit location flow, though its button returns to a plain Find Nearest rather than naming the reason.

Activation Map Mode​

During a POTA activation, the map enters activation mode. The activation park is the single map anchor: the self/user glyph sits there, the camera and recenter button return there, and logged contact markers draw QSO arcs back there. Resumed sessions use the stored park coordinates, with the park grid as a fallback. The map also shows markers for stations that have spotted you (spotter markers), stations you've logged (hunter markers), and stations that are both (spotter+logged markers). Spotter-only markers stay marker-only. Each category has a distinct color. Logged-contact markers reuse the same rich contact popup as the Logbook map.

POTA Detail Spotter Map​

When you open a live POTA activation from the Hunting view, the embedded map inside the detail modal progressively draws arcs from the selected park out to every locatable spotter that reported the activator. The label above the map shows how many of the reporting spotters are on the map so far (e.g. Showing 21 of 22 spotters). Already-mapped glyphs stay visible through provider backoff or a service interruption, and quota pauses resume automatically. Spotters that can't be located are quietly left off the map — reopening the activation tries again. A callbook that can't place an operator's address — a PO box, a military APO/FPO address, an incomplete record — sometimes reports a placeholder position instead of leaving the field blank. Hamtrax counts that as unlocated and leaves the spotter off, so no arc points at open water where nobody is transmitting and the distances in the list view stay truthful. Reports are scoped by program, park, and activator so the same operator appearing at two parks cannot mix spotters between modals.

On desktop, hovering over a spotter is preview-only: it does not hide markers or reframe the map. Clicking pins the popup. On touch, the first tap pins that same popup and starts the focused frame immediately — there is no preview-only tap first.

Every glyph on that map is identifiable, not just plotted. Hover over a spotter marker for their callsign and first name, then their city or grid square and, when available, a flag immediately before their country name; hover over the activator's gray pin at the park for the same details about the station being chased. Clicking either one pins its popup. It begins closing as soon as you press empty map space — even if that press becomes a drag — and also closes when you choose another marker or press Escape. When a spotter popup is pinned, every other spotter and arc fades away; the selected spotter, the activator's gray park pin, and their connecting arc remain. The map uses the tightest frame that keeps both glyphs and the complete popup inside its edges, and pauses progressive all-spotter reframing until the popup closes. Closing it restores the original activator-plus-all-spotters overview. Country resolves from the callbook when it knows the operator and from the callsign's prefix when it doesn't — Hamtrax carries the complete ITU call-sign series, so spotters from anywhere on the air read with the right country and flag.