Helioclock sold out at HHF. Then, when people who missed us at the show turned to the website looking for one, we sold out there too. We’re now sitting on a backlog of roughly 200 orders, and we want to talk straight with you about what that means and what’s coming next.
First, thank you
We built Helioclock as a plug-and-stick earth clock for hams, by a ham. Seeing that resonate enough to sell out twice over in the same week is honestly more than we planned for. If you’re one of the roughly 200 people waiting on an order right now, that response is because of you, and we don’t take it lightly.
What happens now
We’re waiting on new media stock and mini PCs to arrive before we can resume building units. As soon as they’re in hand, we’ll be assembling and shipping as fast as we can.
Shipments will go out strictly in the order they were received. No exceptions, no jumping the line. If you ordered early, you’ll ship early. We know waiting isn’t fun, and we appreciate the patience.
What has been developed since HHF, and will become an automatic update
While the backlog builds, the product itself hasn’t stood still. Helioclock updates itself automatically over your network, so none of this requires a reinstall or a trip back to a computer. Once it’s published, you’ll see a banner on screen letting you know, unless you’ve selected Unattended mode in Settings → Admin, in which case it just applies quietly overnight with no banner at all. A few things worth knowing about, whether you’re waiting on a unit or already running one:
Your callsign will actually save, reliably. A real bug meant a failed save could look identical to a successful one on screen. It’s fixed: saves are properly confirmed, retry automatically on a hiccup, and show a clear error if something’s genuinely wrong, instead of quietly pretending it worked.
QSL Status panel. A new panel will show whether your signal is currently being heard (ACTIVE, FADING, or NOT HEARD), your last LoTW upload date, and every current reception report of your own signal, at a glance.
DX Cluster is getting smarter. You’ll be able to filter spots by continent and CQ/ITU zone, on top of the existing band, mode, and entity filters. And there’s a new DX Cluster Paths map layer: great-circle lines from your QTH to every spot currently shown, color-coded by band, so you can see at a glance where propagation is actually going right now.
Activation Paths. Great-circle lines from your QTH to POTA, SOTA, WWFF, and WWBOTA activations, layered right on top of the activity you’re already tracking.
The ISS marker will stop disappearing. A display glitch that made the ISS icon intermittently vanish and reappear is fixed for good.
RTL-SDR reliability. The SDR waterfall dongle going unresponsive after repeated open/close cycles, something a few of you hit at the show, is fixed with a proper USB-level reset between sessions.
None of this is aspirational roadmap talk. It’s built, tested, and ready to roll out to your unit automatically the moment it’s released, nothing you need to do.
A quick note on cooling and power for Raspberry Pi users
Since a lot of new operators are setting up units right now, a few things worth getting ahead of before they turn into a support email.
Cooling. Don’t skip this one. The display runs a full resolution canvas continuously, which is a sustained CPU and GPU load, and an uncooled Pi 4 or Pi 5 will start to thermal-throttle within 20 to 30 minutes. You’ll see it as stutter and dropped frame rate, and it only gets worse in a warm room or an enclosed cabinet. A bare board with no cooling is not a good place to save money.
The best option, and what we’d point almost everyone toward, is a case with a built-in cooling fan. These run about $10 to $15 on Amazon for both Pi 4 and Pi 5, they take a couple minutes to install, and they solve the problem completely, no throttling, no stutter, no thinking about it again. If you’d rather go fanless, a passive heatsink case works for most rooms, but a fan is cheap insurance and the option we’d recommend first.
Power. Use a real power supply rated for the board, not a phone charger pulled from a drawer. The Pi 4 needs a genuine 5V/3A USB-C supply; the Pi 5 needs 5V/5A (the official 27W USB-C supply) to run at full performance. An underpowered supply shows up as random reboots or instability, and can contribute to SD card corruption over time. Whatever your setup, always power down properly and wait for the screen to go completely dark before pulling power. Removing power while the system is running risks corrupting the SD card. If your unit runs 24/7, a small UPS is a worthwhile add. It gives the system time to shut down cleanly if the power goes out, instead of just cutting off.
USB devices and hubs. If you’re running the RTL-SDR add-on, a mouse and keyboard, or anything else over USB, plug directly into the board’s own USB ports whenever you can. Unpowered hubs, especially cheap ones, are a common source of trouble: they can starve a device of power and cause exactly the kind of dropout and disconnect behavior we just fixed for the RTL-SDR dongle above, and on a Pi they can destabilize the whole system if the board itself gets underpowered as a result. If you genuinely need more ports than the board has, use a powered hub with its own power supply, not a passive one.
None of this is new. It’s the handful of things that come up most in support conversations with new installs, and getting them right up front means one less thing to think about while everything above rolls out to your unit.
Join us on The Grey Line
While you wait for your unit, or if you’re just curious what other operators are doing with theirs, come join us on The Grey Line, our community forum, at helioclock.com/greyline. It’s where operators are already comparing setups, asking questions, and shaping what we build next.
We’ll keep you posted the moment shipping resumes. Thanks again for making this the problem we’re lucky enough to have.
73,
Anthony
KA9NWM
Helioclock
DO YOU SHIP TO THE UK
Not yet. Working on it.