The Map

A living picture of Earth

Four map projections

Switch between a standard Mercator world map, a USA/CONUS view with Alaska and Hawaii insets, a 3D rotating Globe, and an Azimuthal great-circle view centered on your own QTH. Each view supports its own set of live data layers.

Seven map styles

Choose from photorealistic NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble satellite imagery, a clean political map, or a minimalist cyan outline. Pick whatever look fits your shack, office, or lobby.

Real-time day/night terminator

A continuously updated solar terminator sweeps across the map, showing exactly where day turns to night anywhere on the planet right now. It’s the same terminator that drives Helioclock’s greyline propagation features.

Seasonal Earth imagery

Twelve months of true-color satellite imagery swap in automatically on the first of each month. The planet on your screen always looks like it does outside your window.

Ham Radio & Propagation

Built for the shack

Best Band Now

Helioclock’s signature feature ranks every open or marginal HF band live, built from real DX Cluster and Reverse Beacon Network activity rather than a single black-box guess. A band has to hold the top spot for a full 20 minutes before it’s marked CONFIRMED, so you can watch an opening develop in real time.

Greyline & MUF Matrix

See your own greyline propagation windows, plus a live Maximum Usable Frequency estimate across 8 world regions and 9 bands. Both are computed continuously from your own QTH, not a generic global average.

DX Cluster, POTA, SOTA, WWFF & WWBOTA

Live activator and DX spots stream in from five networks at once, each plotted on the map and sorted by distance from your station. No need to keep five separate browser tabs open to track them all.

NCDXF beacons & azimuthal bearings

Track all 18 International Beacon Project frequencies in real time as they rotate. The Azimuthal view draws a straight great-circle line from your QTH to any DX target, so you always know your beam heading.

ISS & satellite tracking

Live ground tracks and pass predictions for the International Space Station and any amateur satellites you choose to follow. Each pass includes a full polar diagram with azimuth and elevation.

EME moon-bounce planner

Enter a remote station’s grid square to see live moon windows for both ends, an overlap timeline, and a full link budget calculator. It tells you not just when a moonbounce contact is possible, but whether your station has the margin to make it.

WSJT-X & PSK Reporter

Live FT8 and FT4 decodes stream in directly from WSJT-X or JTDX running on your own network. PSK Reporter shows who’s hearing your signal and from how far away, right now.

PTT / ON-AIR banner

A full-screen ON AIR banner triggers automatically off your radio’s PTT line, wired through GPIO on a Raspberry Pi or a USB serial adapter on any hardware. Handy for a shared shack, a video call, or just knowing at a glance you’re transmitting.

CW Trainer

A built-in Morse code trainer with both sending and receiving practice, supporting audio input, USB keyers and paddles, WinKeyer, and direct Raspberry Pi GPIO. Score your sending accuracy or test your copy at any speed from 5 to 40 WPM.

RTL-SDR receiver

Add an optional RTL-SDR dongle and Helioclock becomes a real, live shortwave, VHF, UHF, and broadcast FM receiver with its own waterfall and spectrum display. Sold separately; opens right on the same screen.

Quick reference desk

A built-in ham radio cheat sheet covering band plans, Q-codes, CW prosigns, antenna formulas, coax loss tables, and a resistor color-code chart. One keystroke away, no separate app or printed reference needed.

Space Weather

What the sun is doing right now

Solar activity dashboard

Live NASA SDO imagery across six wavelengths, from visible-light sunspots to extreme ultraviolet, paired with SFI, SSN, and a 30-day sunspot trend chart. Everything you need to gauge where the solar cycle stands today.

Geomagnetic & radio storm tracking

Kp, Dst, G-scale, S-scale, and R-scale indices update continuously, so you always know how the geomagnetic field and ionosphere are behaving. Custom alert rules can flag a storm the moment it escalates.

X-ray flux & flare monitoring

A live flare-class gauge and 3-day trend chart flag solar flares the moment NOAA reports them, color-coded by class from A through X. HF blackout severity is shown right alongside it.

Aurora oval

NOAA’s OVATION aurora model shows the current auroral oval over both hemispheres, plus your own visibility odds based on your QTH’s geomagnetic latitude. A 3-day Kp forecast tells you what’s coming.

DRAP HF absorption map

See exactly which HF frequencies are being absorbed by the D-region right now, mapped worldwide or broken down band by band for your own location. It’s the difference between a band being quiet and a band being genuinely dead.

Weather & Earth Events

Beyond the radio

Live NEXRAD radar & GOES clouds

Animated radar loops with up to two hours of history and satellite cloud imagery layer directly onto the map, with NWS watches and warnings drawn on top. Four playback speeds let you scrub through a developing system at your own pace.

Lightning tracking

Real-time strike data from NOAA’s GOES-19 GLM sensor is color-coded by energy on the map. A dedicated Lightning Scope centers on your own QTH with range rings and an audible proximity alert.

Personal weather scopes

Circular, radar-style scope displays for both radar and lightning, centered on your QTH or any location you choose. Nudge controls let you pan and track a storm cell as it moves.

METAR weather stations

Decoded aviation weather from your nearest station shows current conditions plus 24 hours of temperature, wind, humidity, and pressure history. A map layer tracks up to 50 stations worldwide at once.

Earthquakes & volcanoes

Global earthquake and volcanic activity from USGS, VAAC, and the Smithsonian GVP, color-coded by magnitude and activity level. Set your own alert thresholds so only the events that matter to you break through.

Wildfire & air quality monitoring

NASA FIRMS wildfire hotspots and EPA/WAQI air quality readings for your area refresh automatically throughout the day. Both are sized and color-coded so severity is obvious at a glance.

Tides & UV index

NOAA tide predictions come with a full 48-hour chart for any station you choose, no API key required. An hourly UV index forecast with WHO exposure categories rounds out the outdoor picture.

Tropical storm tracking

Storm cards for every active basin worldwide pull from NHC and JTWC, showing position, strength, and movement. Each card updates automatically as a storm develops or moves.

FAA weather cameras

A searchable directory of 955 FAA aviation weather camera sites across the US and Canada opens straight to the live camera view. Search by city, state, or ICAO code.

Panels, News & Customization

Arrange it your way

40+ configurable panels

Every panel can be added, removed, or rearranged across your sidebars, mixing ham radio, weather, space weather, and world-events data however you like. Click any panel for a full detail view with more depth.

Live news & alert crawl

A configurable ticker pulls headlines from ham radio, world news, space, weather, and geology feeds, including your own custom RSS sources. It automatically steps aside for severe weather or space weather alerts, then resumes.

Custom alert rules

Set your own thresholds for earthquakes, solar flares, geomagnetic storms, aurora, and band openings, each with its own crawl color and audio tone. Step-up deduplication means you’re notified when something escalates, not spammed every time the data refreshes.

Markets panel

Track the Dow, NASDAQ, and your own personal stock and crypto watchlist alongside everything else on the display. Useful for a home office or a lobby screen just as much as a shack.

My DX Map

Drop your own pins for places you’ve visited or DX contacts you’ve worked, each with a date, band, and notes. All pin data stays local to your own Helioclock, never in the cloud.

Countdown timer

Keep up to ten upcoming events on the display at once, whether that’s a hamfest, a contest, or a launch window. Each one counts down independently right on the panel.

Access & Reliability

Built to just keep running

Remote View

Open Helioclock from any browser on your LAN, phone, tablet, or laptop, just by typing helioclock.local. Settings sync automatically from the kiosk the first time a new device connects.

No cloud required

Every unit fetches data directly from public sources like NOAA and USGS, with no Helioclock server standing in between. There’s nothing on our end that can go offline and take your display down with it.

Automatic software updates

Updates arrive in the background with no terminal, no package manager, and no manual steps. If something needs fixing, an update handles it the same way it arrived.

Built-in health report

Check disk usage, memory, CPU temperature, uptime, and time-sync status at a glance, without ever opening a terminal. It’s the same information a support ticket would ask for, already sitting on screen.

Self-recovering watchdog

If the display ever stalls, an automatic watchdog reloads it within 90 seconds with no one needing to touch the hardware. Built for 24/7 unattended operation from day one.

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