The Gap

HamClock, and what came after.

For years, HamClock, created by Elwood Downey, WB0OEW, was a fixture in shacks around the world: a kiosk-style display of propagation data, solar conditions, and the other information hams check constantly. I ran it myself.

Elwood became a Silent Key in January 2026, and HamClock reached its official end-of-life shortly after its last release, and a shutdown date for the devices that depended on it. Some folks are trying to keep it alive with other backend servers. Elwood’s work deserves real credit: he built something people relied on for years and gave it away for free.

I didn’t want to just wait and see what happened to the displays I’d come to depend on. I started writing Helioclock on April 20, 2026, to build my own, from scratch. It’s written in HTML5 and Javascript and runs on Ubuntu.

That history shaped a real design decision: Helioclock runs entirely on your own hardware, with no central Helioclock server in the loop at all. There’s nothing on my end that can go offline and take every user’s display down with it; the situation HamClock’s users found themselves in wasn’t something I was willing to risk repeating.

Why I Could Build It

Forty-plus years of weather displays.

I started as a broadcast meteorologist at WLFI-TV 18 in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1978. Followed by KHSL-TV in Chico, CA in 1987, with a radio stint on KPAY Newstalk that I am still doing today. Being in small TV markets with little budget, I had to develop my own systems to be competitive. Since then I’ve developed a second career as a broadcast systems engineer, building weather display systems for television at a company I founded in 2000. Besides the hardware, we include the weather content that runs on them. Helioclock draws directly on that background: it’s not a hobbyist’s first attempt at a data display, it’s built by someone who has spent a career making weather information clear and usable on a screen.

Being a licensed amateur radio operator myself (KA9NWM) is what made the project personally compelling, not just technically interesting. This isn’t a display I built just to sell — it’s the display I wanted to exist, that I’m now making available to other operators, ops teams, and anyone else who wants it.

What It Became

More than a replacement.

Helioclock didn’t stay a like-for-like replacement for long. It grew into its own thing; a full situational awareness kiosk covering weather, space weather, tropical systems, and more, alongside the ham radio tools that started it. Built from the ground up, running on hardware you choose, with no subscription and no cloud dependency for the application operation.

In the design process, I also made it do far more that the original Hamclock product, with a much more modern look and a boatload of features. It is not just a display device for a monitor/TV, it is also a server so that it can serve content in any browser.

I also wanted it to be a simple, turnkey product. Not everyone is a Linux guru, so I didn’t want people have to become one just to run Helioclock. I opted for simplicity: insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, or plug in the Live USB stick on some older hardware you have lying around.

See the full feature set →