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Your Showcase

Your showcase is your ham radio identity in Hamtrax. It displays your callsign, equipment, social links, and one card for each activity program you use — your Parks on the Air activations and hunting live together in the Parks on the Air card. Open your own Showcase from the sidebar or share its unique short-code URL directly. Callsign search is a separate public-data lookup and does not open or advertise a Showcase.

Viewing Your Showcase​

Open the Showcase tab from the sidebar. You'll see your own showcase along with visibility controls that let you choose what sections others can see. Use the centered info-icon What's a Showcase? action at the bottom of the page to open a modal explaining how the showcase works.

If your account has a public short code, select the Copy Link row in the separate Showcase section beneath your identity. It copies the URL of your public station page to the clipboard and confirms the copy. Visitors see only sections marked Public.

The About modal explains why your URL uses a short code (like hamtrax.com/abc123) instead of your callsign — callsigns aren't necessarily unique to each operator, and short codes are compact enough to fit in POTA spot comments.

What's on Your Showcase​

On a wide screen, your own Showcase places Equipment beside the first program card, with later programs full width below. On narrower screens, the sections stack with Equipment first.

Your callsign is displayed prominently at the top alongside your avatar. Below it you'll see:

  • License class -- Your license level (e.g., Amateur Extra, General), shown directly under the callsign.
  • Display name -- Your name as set in Settings > Account.
  • Username -- Your @username, if set.
  • Location -- City, state, and country from your callsign lookup.
  • Local time -- Calculated from your grid square or coordinates.
  • Badges -- Founder badge (if applicable).
  • QSL Manager -- Shown when one is on file from your callsign lookup; visitors see "QSL via …".

Links to your profiles on YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, or your personal website. These display as a scrolling carousel of branded cards in the Social links section of your header card. Choose Add link when the section is empty or Edit links once links exist to edit them inline.

Equipment​

Your radios and antennas from the Rig Manager. Each equipment card shows the name or model, manufacturer or type, supported bands, and image when available. On your own Showcase, tapping a card opens it for editing in Rig Manager; visitors see a read-only detail view. When your own section is empty, + Add radio and + Add antenna open the same Rig Manager creation flow used everywhere else. Visitors see the empty-state story without editing controls.

Program cards​

Your folders are shown one card per activity program, titled with the program's own name — Parks on the Air, DX Chasing — rather than one card per kind of folder. Inside a program that supports both activating and hunting, Activations and Hunting are headings within that program's card. A program that supports only one of the two has nothing to disambiguate, so its cards sit directly in the card with no heading. DX Chasing doesn't show folders at all: it replaces the folder list with a map, for the reason its section below explains.

Repeaters is not on your showcase. It has no card, no map, and no visibility toggle — the showcase is a curated surface, and a repeater month card reading "March 2026, 12 contacts" says nothing about which repeaters carried them. Nothing about your repeater work changes: the Repeaters tab, the directory, worked badges, and logging all behave exactly as before, and your repeater month folders stay in the Logbook tree, where a safely resolved month carries the same repeater-tower icon the Repeaters tab wears and opens with Monthly Repeaters Folder.

Each heading keeps its own Show all window — four cards by default, then pages of 10 — so a program's activations can never crowd out its hunting. A heading with no folders yet is left out rather than drawn empty.

Folder cards use matching tile sizes whether or not photos are attached. An attached photo is the cover; otherwise the card can show a map of that folder's contacts. Public map previews show approximate contact areas. When no map preview is available, the card keeps its month or day cover. Every card shows its contact count.

Folders with 0 contacts stay on your own Showcase as gray cards that you can still open. Each carries a note that empty folders aren't shown on your public Showcase. Only folders with at least one contact appear publicly, even when an empty folder has photos, notes, or links.

On your own Showcase, choose Open in logbook at the bottom right of a folder's detail modal to open that folder in your Logbook.

Choose an item under Equipment used in an activation or hunting folder to see its details. Edit opens that profile in Rig Manager when you are viewing your own Showcase and it is still saved in your account. Visitors and past equipment retained only as contact text see read-only details.

Activations​

A resolved POTA card shows the park reference, date, and contact count, plus a cover photo with a photo-count badge when photos are attached; when the catalog has an exact match, it also shows the park name and location. An activation that is still open is marked in green. Cards with attached livestream URLs show a livestream badge.

+ Activation belongs to the program card and appears only for a program that supports activating. It opens that program's Activate flow; it does not create a folder by itself. Visitors never see it — they get the empty-state story without an action.

Tap a card to open a detail modal with the full photo gallery, notes, livestream link thumbnails with video titles, and contact views for List, Map, and DX. Contacts open in List view by default. On your own Showcase, Add photos, Add note, and Add link sit together above the gallery and wrap on narrower screens. Add photos takes a whole selection at once, not one photo per browse. Once a note or links exist, their actions become Edit note and Edit links; the editors open when selected, while saved notes stay visible and saved livestream links open their destinations. Visitors see the saved content without editing controls.

The modal also has a Share map button at the top, just above the photos, that generates the folder's shareable contact-map image — the same flow as the Logbook's folder Share map button — and each contact row includes a Share button, left of Edit, for creating that contact's shareable QSL-card image. Share map and the row's Share button appear only on your own Showcase, never for visitors viewing it.

Hunting​

Your monthly hunting folders (program-qualified Hunt QSOs) are displayed as clickable cards under that program's Hunting heading. A resolved folder shows the month and year (for example, "March 2026") and QSO count. The current month's card is highlighted for quick orientation. Tap a card to open the same editable detail modal as activations: photos, notes, and links are editable, a Share map button at the top of the modal generates the month's contact-map image, and each contact row has a Share button.

Find activations is the empty-state action inside a program card that supports hunting, and it opens that program's hunt tab so you can work an activator. The resulting QSO still goes through Hamtrax's normal save path and monthly auto-organization. Visitors see the empty-state story without an action.

DX Chasing​

DX Chasing has its own kind of Showcase card rather than a folder list — a month card can say "March 2026, 12 contacts" and nothing about countries, which is the only thing DX chasing is about. Your DX month folders stay in the Logbook tree, where a safely resolved DX month still opens with DX Chasing's globe icon and the localized Monthly DX Folder type line. Unresolved or contradictory folder identity remains unbranded rather than borrowing another program's emblem.

The card shows a world map of everywhere you've made contact. All time · whole logbook sits above the map, and both halves are meant literally. The map covers every country you've ever worked rather than the month you're in — your DX month folders in the Logbook are the month-at-a-time view — and it reads your whole logbook, not just contacts made through DX Chasing: a country worked during a park activation counts exactly the same as one chased off the cluster, and so does an imported contact. A contact counts three ways, whichever it has first: the official ADIF entity number saved on it, a DX chase's recorded country, or a country name that exactly matches an entity Hamtrax knows.

Countries you've worked are filled in. Entities a country shape can't honestly represent get their own marker instead: Alaska and Hawaii are separate DXCC entities from the mainland US, and island entities like the Canary Islands fly another country's flag, so filling in the parent would claim contacts you haven't made. Russia and Malaysia are the opposite case — DXCC splits each into several entities with no single entity for the whole country, so they stay unfilled with markers on the parts you've worked. The mix of fills and markers keeps the map honest when countries and DXCC award entities do not line up one-to-one.

If you haven't worked anything yet, the card says so and offers a way into DX Chasing rather than showing an empty map. On a shared showcase link the map loads after the rest of the page, so a visitor sees your profile immediately and the map fills in a moment later.

Tap the map to open it full size; the full-screen view carries the same All time · whole logbook line beneath its prompt. The large map can be panned and zoomed — on a touchscreen, use two fingers to move it, so scrolling past the card doesn't trap the page. On your own Showcase, the prompt reads Select a country to see your contacts there. Tap any country you've worked and the map centers on it first, keeps the total, and adds Latest contacts with up to your five newest matching QSOs; the markers for entities like Alaska or the Canary Islands work the same way. On a shared Showcase, the prompt instead reads Select a country to see the contact count. Visitors see only that aggregate count because private QSO rows are never sent through the relay. Countries you haven't worked don't respond, and nothing in the map is editable.

If an older folder's stored program, reference, day, or month cannot be safely resolved, it is never guessed as POTA or sent to a catalog — and it does not appear on your Showcase at all. The Showcase only shows folders that belong to a registered program. An unresolved folder stays fully visible, openable, and exportable in the Logbook tree under the Unrecognized program heading (see Logbook Hygiene); when the park reference is what went wrong, correcting the park there moves the folder back into its program — and onto your Showcase.

Folder detail modals use the same program-qualified contact identity across List, Map, and DX on both your own and public Showcases. Same-looking references from different programs remain separate, while unresolved contacts stay visible without borrowed POTA names, pins, or geography.

Photos, notes, and links in activation and hunting folders follow the shared Folder Media contract, including the multi-select photo picker, per-folder cap, supported formats, size limit, and upload confirmation.

Public Visibility Controls​

Equipment, social links, and each program card carry visibility toggles that control whether they appear on your public showcase. Marking a section Public lets visitors see its shared content, including folders with at least one contact; anything marked Hidden is only shown to you.

A program gets one toggle per thing it does, so Parks on the Air has a separate toggle for Activations and for Hunting — you can publish your activations while keeping your hunting private, or the reverse. A program that only does one thing, like DX Chasing, has a single toggle. Repeaters has no toggle because it has nothing on your showcase to publish or hide.

If you hid Hunting or Activations before program cards existed, that choice still stands: it applies to every program's folders of that kind until you change it. The DX Chasing map is newer than that choice, so it starts visible regardless — an old preference about park folders was never a decision about your countries. It has its own toggle from the start, so hiding the map takes one tap and affects nothing else.

In a program card that shows both Activations and Hunting, each heading carries its own toggle. A heading only appears once it has folders, and its toggle appears with it. An empty program card shows one toggle in its header, for the heading its empty state describes; the other heading's toggle appears once it has its first folder.

Editing Your Showcase​

Showcase information is managed through different parts of the app:

  • Callsign, name, and avatar -- Go to Settings > Account to update your profile identity.
  • Equipment -- Tap any equipment card to edit it in the Rig Manager, or use + Add radio / + Add antenna.
  • Social links -- Choose Add link or Edit links to update your links inline.
tip

Your activation cards update automatically as you log QSOs. You don't need to edit these -- they're always current.

info

Your showcase is public via a unique short code (not your callsign). Callsigns aren't necessarily unique — portable prefixes, club calls, and international duplicates mean multiple operators can share the same callsign. Your short code is a unique, compact identifier that works in URLs and POTA spot comments. Callsign search does not resolve that URL, reveal whether an operator uses Hamtrax, or expose Showcase cards. Your email address and account details are never shown. Use the visibility toggles to control which cards, and which headings inside them, appear publicly.

Looking Up Callsigns​

Callsign search is membership-neutral. Selecting a result opens one public operator dossier whether or not that callsign belongs to a Hamtrax account. It can show:

  • Callbook and licence details: name, class (marked Expired once lapsed), city/region/country, grid, local time, and QSL manager.
  • Current public POTA and DX spots.
  • RBN and PSK Reporter receptions from the last hour.
  • The public POTA hunter total and latest 25 public hunter contacts.

Its Log Contact button opens the contact form with their callsign filled in, plus the frequency, mode, and POTA park from a live spot.

The dossier never shows street address, ZIP code, exact coordinates, Hamtrax membership or account activity, Showcase prompts/cards, private QRZ or POTA logbooks, LoTW, or N1MM records. Its public sections and service groups load independently, and an unavailable group can be retried without blanking successful sections.

To look up an operator:

  1. Use the main search bar.
  2. Enter a callsign.
  3. Select the result to open the callsign dossier.