Posted by KA9NWM
Monday July 27th the press release goes out, so it's official: Helioclock will make its public debut at the ARRL National Convention, Huntsville Hamfest, August 22-23, 2026, at booth #V55.
If you've been following along here, none of this is a surprise, but I wanted to put the real announcement in front of you directly rather than just letting it show up in a magazine or a forum thread first.
Helioclock is a dedicated, always-on situational awareness display built for ham shacks, EOCs, NOCs, and civil defense operations. Live HF band conditions, space weather, contest information, and a wide range of real-time data feeds, all on one screen, no browser tabs to juggle, no subscription. It runs fully automated, 24/7/365, built around the idea that this kind of display cannot have a single point of failure.
The centerpiece is Best Band Now, and it's the feature I'm proudest of from this months of work. Instead of collapsing propagation data down into a single best guess, it shows every open or marginal HF band on a live, continuously ranked leaderboard, similar to a golf leaderboard, so you can see exactly how each band stacks up and why. Every band's score comes from real DX cluster and Reverse Beacon Network activity, weighted by frequency and headroom below the Maximum Usable Frequency, so a band with genuinely strong evidence can't get quietly buried by one with only a handful of spots. A band has to hold the #1 spot for a full 20 minutes before it's marked CONFIRMED; before that, it shows LEADING with a live countdown, so you can watch a band opening develop in real time instead of reacting after the fact. I validated the whole model against a log of more than 4,000 real band-decision records before I trusted it enough to ship.
If you add an RTL-SDR dongle, Helioclock can even measure received beacons directly at your own QTH for extra confidence.
Best Band Now is the headline, but it's one piece of a much bigger display. Photorealistic world and CONUS maps that change with the seasons. Live contest calendar and DX information, grey line, solar flux and imagery. Wildfire, earthquake, and volcanic activity, air quality, live camera feeds, news and weather bulletins with configurable local alerts. Live NEXRAD radar and satellite imagery. Financial markets. Tides, sea surface temperature, and tropical storm tracking. A PTT/ON-AIR banner, code practice, electronic references, even broadcast-style test patterns for SSTV. Over 40 active features in total, arranged however you want them on screen. Optional RTL-SDR support turns the same hardware into your own listening receiver, with on-screen control, alongside its work confirming Best Band Now.
It's designed to run on whatever hardware a shack already has or can add cheaply: a small-form-factor x86 mini PC, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, a bootable Live USB stick that turns almost any spare PC or laptop from the last decade into a Helioclock display without touching its installed OS, or a ready-to-run turnkey appliance if you'd rather not think about hardware at all.
If you're headed to Huntsville, come find me at booth #V55 on the map below.
I'll have Best Band Now running live against real band conditions, and I'll be there in person to talk through how any of it works. Ready-to-run systems, SD cards, and Live USB devices will all be available for purchase at the show.
I built Helioclock because I noticed the same thing in my own shack that I think a lot of operators deal with: five browser tabs open just to answer one question, what band should I be on right now. This puts the real evidence in front of you instead of a black-box guess, in a display that looks and feels like something built for right now, not a decade-old project kept alive out of obligation.
More information, screenshots, and a live interactive demo (coming by show time) at helioclock.com.
73,
Anthony Watts, KA9NWM
contact "at" helioclock.com
DOWNLOAD THE PRESS RELEASE HERE: https://helioclock.com/wp-content/uploads/HelioClock_Press_Release.pdf
DOWLOAD THE FLYER HERE: https://helioclock.com/wp-content/uploads/Helioclock_Ham_Flyer-Final.pdf