SliceLogger v1.1.0.0 is available 🎉

Tim - W4TME

SliceLogger v1.1.0.0

https://github.com/tmellisonjr-create/SliceLogger/releases/tag/v1.1.0.0

SliceLogger 1.1.0.0 adds two significant new capabilities. A new QTH Map shows exactly where the station you're working actually is — down to a precise coordinate or grid square when one's available, tightening out to state or country as the data gets less precise — and real-time QSO backup mirrors every logged contact out to up to three folders of your choosing as you work, so your log survives a drive failure without waiting on a scheduled export.

Also in this release: an opt-in check for new versions right from the app, a fix for Weather Radar tiles failing to load, and a batch of accuracy fixes — including one for Country not always filling in on ADIF-imported records. Thanks as always to everyone who filed a bug report or feature request this cycle; several of the fixes below trace straight back to your reports.

What's new — QTH Map

A new 9th Map Hub tab plots where the station being logged (or edited) physically is, on the same street map used by Weather Radar. Like every other Map Hub tab, it pops out into its own window if you want it undocked.

• Zoom radius follows how precise the location data actually is — a tight zoom for an exact coordinate or 6-digit grid square, widening out to a state-level or country-level view as the available data gets coarser, and falling back to your own operator's home QTH when nothing else resolves.
• Country is now always shown in the map's station label, not just when City/State are blank — useful for a DX contact whose city alone (e.g. Irkutsk) doesn't make the country obvious.
• Stays in sync automatically as you fill out the Log a QSO form, and re-syncs whenever you switch back to the tab; a new Refresh button re-resolves on demand from the form's current state.
• Live-verified against real contacts, including compound callsigns (e.g., EA8/G6XML).

What's new — Real-time QSO Backup

Settings → Maintenance → Backup now supports mirroring every logged QSO, in plain ADIF format, out to up to 3 folders of your choosing — a different drive, a thumb drive, a network share, or a cloud-sync client's local folder.

• Writes as you go — each QSO is appended the moment it's logged, with its own serial write queue per target so a contest's rapid logging cadence never interleaves writes to the same file.
• Self-monitoring — a target that fails or writes slowly is taken offline automatically (immediately on a hard I/O failure, after two slow writes in a row for a merely sluggish one), and self-heals the moment a later write succeeds, no action required. A status-bar indicator and a colored dot per target in the Backup tab flag a degraded target until it clears.
• "Back up now" runs a full re-seed of a target (oldest-first, so the file reads chronologically top-to-bottom) — useful to close the gap after a target was degraded, or any time you want a fresh full copy.
• Complements routine ADIF export as a second, set-and-forget backup method — live-tested against a real 2,921-QSO log and a physically removed/reinserted USB drive.

What's new — opt-in update check

• Settings → Configuration → Updates now has a toggle for a silent, automatic check on launch — off by default. When a newer release is found, a status-bar indicator appears (never a popup), leading to the same View Update / Remind Me Later / Dismiss dialog already used by the existing manual Help → Check for Updates.

Bug fixes

• Fixed Country not filling in on some ADIF-imported records. A record with no COUNTRY/DXCC field of its own — for example, a remote-station export that states only the callsign — previously sat with a blank Country until the next app restart. Country now resolves immediately at import time.
• Fixed Weather Radar tiles failing to load (403 errors). The base map now uses Esri's World Street Map tiles, which need no API key and render with more color depth than the previous base layer.
• Fixed occasional duplicate entries in the DX Spot Display caused by a timing race between seeding the display from its replay buffer and a live spot arriving at nearly the same moment — a spot could show up as two rows instead of one.
• Fixed the in-progress QSO arrow not appearing on the Grid, DXCC, WAS, CQ Zone, or ITU Zone maps after switching to that tab mid-QSO — it previously required a manual zoom-reset click to show up. Switching tabs now catches the map back up automatically.
• Fixed TIME_OFF sometimes missing entirely from manually logged QSOs. A fast contact — common in CW — could log TIME_ON and TIME_OFF within the same displayed second, which was incorrectly rejected as an invalid pair and silently dropped TIME_OFF instead of recording it. A user reported this; it's now fixed.
• Fixed the Map Hub window staying minimized when reopened from the menu. If the Map Hub was minimized and you clicked its menu item again, it stayed minimized instead of coming back to the front; it now restores correctly.

SM6KZW

This looks like a very interesting project, and the new QTH Map and real-time QSO backup features in particular are things I would like to try.

There is just one thing I am curious about. I noticed that SliceLogger is currently Windows 10/11 only, and that the GitHub repository contains the release binaries but not the application source code.

Was the Windows-only design a deliberate technical decision from the beginning? Since this is a new application rather than an older Windows application being ported forward, I am curious what led you to choose a Windows-specific platform instead of a cross-platform technology.

I ask because I don't use proprietary operating systems, so unfortunately I cannot try SliceLogger even though I would otherwise be very interested in it. From a user's perspective it seems a little unfortunate to exclude Linux and macOS from a completely new logging application, particularly when modern cross-platform frameworks make that increasingly practical.

If you don't mind sharing, I'd be interested to know which language/framework/platform SliceLogger is built on and what the reasoning was behind the Windows-only choice.