The same window the aircraft use, given marks that are not aeroplanes. It
already knew how to fetch a map, place an information box where it covers
nothing, glide it when its owner moves, draw range rings, put a flag where
the aerial stands and a scale along the bottom -- and not one of those has
anything to do with aviation. What it did not know is that a mark might not
fade, might not point anywhere, and might be coloured by what it is rather
than by how high it is. Those are three hooks rather than a second window,
and the aircraft map is untouched: every one of them defaults to exactly what
an aeroplane does.
Nothing fades, which is the difference asked for and the right one. An
aeroplane that stops transmitting has flown out of range, and drawing it an
hour later where it was would be drawing something that is certainly not
there. A fixed amateur station that stops transmitting is still exactly
where it was -- it beacons every half hour, and the gaps are silence rather
than absence. So the picture accumulates and an evening of listening fills a
map. Marks are ordered most-recently-heard first, because that is the order
the boxes are laid out in and an accumulating map has more marks on it than
it has room for boxes.
Marks are drawn by what they are: something moving as a body with a stalk
pointing where it is going, and anything fixed as a diamond, which is the one
shape on the picture with no front -- a house that beacons twice an hour is a
place, and a triangle would have it pointing north for no reason. Colours
come off the altitude ramp, not because a station has an altitude but because
that ramp is the one set of colours all five themes define: warm to cold on
the default map, dim to bright on the phosphor ones, so a digipeater stays
distinguishable from a car everywhere without a colour being named here.
The box says what the station is, how far off and in which bearing, what it
is doing if it is moving, its altitude, its weather, its status, the
digipeaters it came through, how many packets and how many of those arrived
directly, and how strongly. The heading prints the callsign once: an
aeroplane has two names and the heading was built for that.
Reachable both ways, as everything here is -- --window on the command line, w
in the menu -- with the same eight map settings the aircraft side has.
Forty new tests against nine deliberately broken builds. Two of them survived
the first attempt, and both for the same reason: they asked whether the
rendered frames differed rather than whether the symbol did, and the strip
along the top carries a running clock, so two frames taken a millisecond apart
differ by a few hundred pixels whatever is on the map. They now crop to the
mark. That is the second time this session that a ticking header has made a
test pass for the wrong reason. Full suite 2652 passed. Built as
2026-09-21_01.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
2c7b1ba25e