Why I Started Building Helioclock
Posted by KA9NWM
Helioclock started on April 20, 2026. I want to write down why, while I still remember it clearly.
For years, hams running a station clock and propagation display had one real option: HamClock, built by WB0OEW. It did the job it was built to do — greyline, band conditions, satellite passes, solar data, all on one screen, no fuss. A lot of shacks and clubhouses ran it quietly in the background for years.
WB0OEW passed away in January 2026, Silent Key. HamClock didn’t get an update after that, and it wasn’t going to. That’s not a criticism of the project or the person who built it — it’s just what happens to a one-person labor of love when the person is gone. Somebody has to decide whether to let something like that fade out, or pick up the idea and keep building.
I decided to build something new instead of trying to patch or fork the old codebase. Not because HamClock did anything wrong, but because starting fresh let me make my own decisions about architecture from day one, and because I wanted this new thing to carry its own name rather than wear someone else’s as a shell.
The core idea I started with on April 20th, and the one I still keep coming back to every time I’m deciding whether to build something: no central server, no single point of failure. A Helioclock unit is a single-page app talking to its own local Node.js server. It pulls data from public sources, NOAA, USGS, POTA, SOTA, and others — but there’s no Helioclock cloud service sitting in the middle that could get shut down, bought, or simply neglected the way HamClock’s update path did. If my server goes offline for good someday, every unit already in someone’s shack keeps running exactly as it did the day before. That’s the promise I’m building toward, and it shapes almost every technical decision that follows from here.
I also picked three audiences from the very start, because I didn’t want to build something that only made sense to one kind of user: ham radio operators who want real propagation awareness (greyline is the heart of that), corporate settings like NOCs, trading floors, and dispatch desks where a locked-down display can’t just install an app from a store, and individual weather and space-weather enthusiasts who just want a good ambient dashboard.
None of that was fully proven on April 20th — it was a plan, not a product. But it’s the plan I’ve been building against every session since, and most of what I’ll be writing about in this Release History series is the record of turning that plan into working code: real data sources, real bugs found and fixed, real decisions about what to build and what to leave out.
I’ll be showing Helioclock at Huntsville Hamfest — the ARRL National Convention — on August 22–23. More on that as it gets closer.
73,
Anthony, KA9NWM