Maps Overview
Hamtrax gives you two ways to visualize ham radio activity: an interactive 2D map and a stacked list view. Both live inside the Parks on the Air, DX Chasing, and Repeaters tabs, and each tab's map and list always show the same thing as each other — live spots in the first two, the nearby repeater directory in the third.
Interactive maps label major cities by default, starting with cities above 10 million people and lowering the population threshold as you zoom in. A small dot anchors each displayed name at the city's coordinates, and MapLibre hides the name and dot together when labels overlap. You can turn both off under Settings > Preferences > Map > Major city names; the public Profile World Coverage visualization stays unchanged.
What the Map Shows
The Parks on the Air map renders live POTA activations as park markers, and the DX Chasing map renders live DX cluster spots pinned at their DXCC entity's map centroid. Marker color reflects status the same way in both — default, hunted, attempted, or marked for retry. Their popups keep each program's reading order: POTA leads with the activator, while DX leads with the canonical entity title, prefixed by its parent-country flag when available, before naming the station. Catalog park pins in Hunt, activation setup, and Park Explorer share one straight dark card; touch users can continue through any non-control card area or its gold see details row, while mouse clicks still open the destination directly. The Repeaters map is the one that isn't a spot feed: it pins repeaters at their own published locations, and it carries the whole directory rather than just the hundred in the list beside it — so the list answers "what can I reach from here?" while the map keeps showing every repeater anywhere you pan. The signed-out page first centers that nearby list and camera around a useful nearby starting area when one is available, with Chicago, IL as the fallback; choosing Search by area or successfully using Use my location replaces that browse center for the session, and the camera follows the same accepted coordinates. A repeater pin carries no status controls — nobody is on the air on it — and instead of a detail page it names the repeater in full and offers to log a contact through it. Hamtrax also renders maps in other places: the Logbook tab plots your logged QSOs with great-circle arc lines, ongoing activation maps draw logged-contact arcs back to your activation park anchor, and the POTA activation detail modal progressively draws arcs from a park out to its locatable spotters, then keeps a selected spotter, the activator, their connecting arc, and the full popup together in the tightest safe frame before restoring the activator-plus-all-spotters overview when the popup closes. Those views are covered in their own sections of the docs.
Activation setup adds one location preview: your self-location glyph begins at your known location, slides to the resolved location of a recognized park when you choose one, and returns when you clear it. If that park has only a grid square, the preview uses the grid's center. The move uses a slow-fast-slow glide with two radiant omnicolor beams in every cardinal direction. After the glyph reaches the park, the camera focuses at the map's closest park zoom; after it reaches home on clear, the camera restores the normal overview zoom. At the park, this one glyph opens the same park details as the catalog pin it replaces. Your saved location remains unchanged, and Reduce Motion completes the glyph phase immediately before the camera snaps without beams.
Those actionable POTA, DX, and catalog-park cards also reuse any place-photo set already cached in the current session as a small stack beside see details. Each visible layer shows a different photo. The popup never starts another photo lookup, though it may load the additional tiny thumbnail renditions. See 2D Map for the shared popup rules.
Live POTA cards add the outlined Heard button for spotting an activator without logging a contact, until Contacted becomes that station's status and the button leaves the card. The map popup, hunting list, and activation detail modal share that behavior, its callsign requirement, and its five-minute wait after a successful Hamtrax spot. See Spotting an activator with Heard.
Switching Views
The map and the list aren't two separate modes — they're laid out together:
- Open the Parks on the Air tab.
- On wide screens (tablet and up), the list panel sits to the left of the map.
- On narrow screens, the list overlays the map and you can collapse or expand it with the floating chevron above the panel's bottom edge (drag the chevron up/down or tap to toggle).
On the signed-out public site, Home's preloaded POTA map stays in place when you first open Hunt. Switching Hunting programs after that starts the incoming tab in its own map frame instead of carrying over the previous tab's pan and zoom. DX returns to the normal overview, and Repeaters returns to its active browse area. POTA waits for an eligible CLICK to hunt contacts marker, then pans and zooms directly to it in one motion; if no eligible marker is available, POTA uses the normal overview instead.
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 in place; map-to-list highlighting still works.
[SCREENSHOT: Parks on the Air tab showing 2D map with spot markers]
What You'll See
The map displays live POTA activations as colored park markers. 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 vertical stack of regular spot popups, one per operator. Each popup is one straight-sided card that enriches the callsign with the operator's callbook name and location when known, then shows the radio details, status controls, band-plan warning when applicable, and gold see details row with a chevron. Tap any non-control area of an operator card or its see details row to open that operator's detail modal; the shared stack heading is informational. While a popup is pinned, the rest of the map's pins fade out so it stands alone, returning the moment you dismiss it. See Finding Live Activations for the full interaction.
Map Controls
A small floating pill at the bottom-center of the map lets you recenter on the current map anchor, zoom in or out without pinching, and access hunting-only map tools like the center-location pin. See the 2D Map page for details.
Marker Clustering
When you're zoomed out, nearby spots are grouped into clusters to keep the map readable. Each cluster shows a count of how many spots it contains. Zoom in or tap the cluster to expand it and see individual markers.
Clustering separates markers that are near each other. Markers sitting on the identical coordinate can never be pulled apart by zooming, so the Repeaters and Park Explorer maps keep them as one pin wearing a count, whose popup stacks a card for every repeater or park underneath it, while Logbook maps fan theirs onto a small ring instead — see When Pins Land on the Same Spot.
Day/Night Overlay
The 2D map shows a real-time day/night overlay. The shaded region represents nighttime, and the faint twilight band around the terminator marks the gray-line zone -- a prime zone for enhanced propagation on HF.
The gray-line band updates automatically every minute. It's especially useful for DXers looking to take advantage of twilight propagation paths.
Reception Footprint (PSK Reporter)
On the POTA hunting map you can toggle a reception footprint -- the stations that recently reported hearing you, pulled from PSK Reporter -- so you can confirm at a glance that your signal is getting out. See the 2D Map page for details, or use the full-page PSK Reporter tool for an editable callsign and report list.
Connection Lines
When the map is rendering your logged QSOs (for example, in the Logbook tab's map view), it draws great-circle arc lines between your station location and each contact's location. When that QSO has a resolved operator origin, selecting the contact keeps its marker, the matching You pin, their arc, and the complete popup together in the tightest safe frame; closing the popup restores the opening full-folder overview. See QSO Arcs for the location and fallback rules. During an ongoing activation, the activation park is the single anchor for the self glyph, camera/recenter target, and logged-contact arcs; logged-contact markers use the same rich contact popup as Logbook markers, while spotter-only markers stay marker-only.
Stacked List View
If you prefer browsing spots without focusing on the map, the stacked list view shows activity as a scrollable, filterable list. Tap a live POTA or DX row—or a park row in Park Explorer—and, when the detail view is ready, the card expands into the detail modal: a copy of the card keeps the row's exact pixels and fades while its edges carry out to the modal's full size, and the modal fades in beneath them. Any non-control area of a detail-capable map-popup card — including its cached photo stack — now opens the same way, as does its gold see details row, so the popup itself expands into the modal instead of the modal simply appearing over it. Heard, status, tuning, and help controls keep their own actions. This applies to live POTA and DX pins, catalog park pins in Hunt and Park Explorer, and activation setup map pins. The expansion runs on the browser's graphics thread, so it stays smooth even while the modal is still filling in behind it. Everything else fades: park search and other direct opens fade the modal in, closing a loaded detail modal fades it out in one motion, with its looked-up operator name and location still in place until it is gone, and a desktop mouse click straight on a glyph skips the popup, so it fades too. Devices set to Reduce Motion get that same plain fade in place of the expansion. Repeater rows select their matching map pin instead because repeaters have no detail modal, and a repeater popup's Log Contact button is unchanged. The list view is always available alongside the map — they share the screen rather than swapping in and out.
If a detail view needs a moment to load, a loading window appears first. You can close it and keep browsing.
Related Pages
- 2D Map -- Pan, zoom, and explore activity on the interactive flat map, including the five-second slow-load recovery on public maps.
- Hunting -- Learn how hunting live POTA spots works.
- DX Chasing -- The same map beside a live DX cluster feed, with a country detail view behind every spot.
- Repeaters -- The same map beside the nearby-repeater directory. Every pin names its repeater in full and offers Log Contact — except while an activation is live, when that button goes away with the rest of the tab's logging controls. There is no detail page behind it.
- Preferences -- Configure map display settings.
- PSK Reporter -- Check recent FT8 reception on its own map and report list.