Weak Signal Sleuth

A desktop early-warning system for VHF band openings. Weak Signal Sleuth exists to do
one thing better than anything else: tell you the instant 6 meters opens in your local
area. The magic band lights up without warning — a sporadic-E cloud can open 50 MHz for
minutes and vanish before you ever glance at the radio. Sleuth watches the spotting
networks for you and raises the alarm the moment your region starts to open.

Built with Tauri v2 + React (Rust backend, web UI), it ships as a native Windows
.exe with a tiny footprint.

By KD9TAW · v1.1.0

What it watches (in priority order)

1. 6-meter openings, local to you (primary). Sleuth's whole focus is 50 MHz
   propagation near your QTH. It watches for the signs that 6 m is opening into and out
   of your region and fires a desktop notification so you can get on the band before the
   opening fades.
2. 2-meter openings (secondary). The same engine watches 144 MHz for tropo and
   sporadic-E openings, so you catch the rarer VHF runs as conditions lift.
3. Meteor-scatter activity (third). Surfaces meteor-scatter pings — the brief
   reflections that let VHF operators work far beyond the horizon — so you know when the
   rocks are working.

How it works

• Real-time spot intelligence — continuously polls PSKReporter and reads a
  DX Cluster over telnet, focused on VHF activity in and around your area.
• World-map visualization — plots spots and reception paths so you can see an
  opening form across nearby regions instead of squinting at a spot list.
• Opening predictor (ML) — a lightweight logistic model turns the recent window of
  activity into an opening probability, weighing spot volume, unique stations,
  reciprocal (two-way) paths, geographic spread, and time of day. Weights are tunable in
  the UI or via ml_weights.json.
• Desktop notifications — get alerted the instant a watched opening crosses your
  threshold.
• Tabbed workspace — Monitor, Map, ML, Logs, and Settings.

Nothing here touches your radio: it's an intelligence and alerting tool that tells you
when 6 m (or 2 m, or the meteor scatter) is worth getting on.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• Rust (stable, MSVC toolchain)
• Visual Studio Build Tools (C++ workload + Windows 10/11 SDK)
• WebView2 runtime

Develop

npm install
npm run tauri:dev

Build the Windows .exe

npm run tauri:build
# EXE:       src-tauri/target/release/weak-signal-sleuth.exe
# Installer: src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

Project layout

Part of the hamradiotools.io open-source toolkit.