Using It
The main window is one screen: a row of search controls, a results tree, and a status line. Everything below is reachable from the keyboard.
The search controls
Direction
Alt+D. Two choices:
- Who heard me — stations that reported hearing the callsign you entered. This is the usual "how is my signal getting out?" question.
- Who I heard — stations that the callsign you entered reported hearing. Useful for checking someone else's receive coverage, or your own if you run a receiver that uploads to PSK Reporter.
Callsign
Alt+C. Any callsign; case and spacing are cleaned up for you. Press Enter here to run the search without leaving the box.
How far back
Alt+B. The look-back window: 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, or 1, 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours. Shorter windows return faster and show only current conditions; longer windows show more stations but include older spots. PSK Reporter itself keeps roughly the last 24 hours.
Update every
Alt+U. Leave on Manual only to fetch only when you ask, or choose 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes to have PSK Heard By re-fetch on its own while you operate. When auto-refresh is on, a Stop Updates button appears; pressing it returns you to Manual only. Five minutes is the shortest interval — PSK Reporter asks clients not to poll more often than that.
Running a fetch
Press Alt+K (or the Check Now button, or Enter in the callsign box). The status line shows progress and then the outcome — time, HTTP result, and how many reports came back. Press Alt+S to move into the status line and read the last several messages with arrow keys. You can also turn on a success or failure sound.
The results tree
Alt+T moves focus to the tree. Navigate with the arrow keys; Left and Right collapse and expand branches.
What each line says
- Group lines read as the group name plus a count, e.g. "United States, 42 reports" or "20m, 18 reports".
- Station lines (the leaves) read as the callsign, then the best signal report, the distance in miles, the receiver's grid square, and how long ago it was heard — e.g. "W1ABC, +3 dB, 812 mi, FN42, 6 min ago". If the same station heard the callsign several times in the window, the line shows "(4 spots)" and keeps the strongest report.
Station detail
Press Enter on any station line for a detail box: callsign, country, state or province, continent, grid, band, mode, frequency, signal report, distance, and the exact time in UTC. Press Escape to close it.
Shaping the tree: Tree Layout
Press Alt+L (or the Tree Layout button) to choose which fields group the results and in what order.
- The dialog is a checked list. Check a field to include it as a grouping level; leave it unchecked to omit it.
- Order is top to bottom: the first checked field is the outermost grouping, the next checked field groups within it, and so on.
- Select a field and use the Up / Down buttons (Alt+U / Alt+D in that dialog) to move it.
- Call is always the leaf level and is added automatically if you don't check it.
Available fields
| Field | Groups by |
|---|---|
| Band | Ham band worked out from the spot frequency (160m through 70cm), ordered low to high. |
| Continent | Continent of the far-end station. |
| Country | DXCC country / entity. |
| District Region | Sub-country region where PSK Reporter provides one. |
| State / Province | US state, Canadian province, etc. Spots with no state are folded into the level above rather than a separate "Unknown" branch. |
| Grid | First four characters of the receiver's Maidenhead grid (e.g. FN42). |
| Distance | Distance band: under 100, 100–499, 500–999, 1000–2499, 2500–4999, or 5000+ miles. |
| Call | The station itself — always the innermost level. |
The default layout is Band › Country › State / Province › Grid › Call. Your layout is saved and reused next time.
How location is worked out
Country, state, region, and continent come from PSK Reporter's own fields first. Where those are missing, PSK Heard By falls back to a built-in callsign-prefix table and to a small local cache it builds as it goes, so grouping still works for most spots even when the report itself is sparse.
Accumulating spots across a session
By default each fetch replaces the previous results. Turn on Accumulate spots across fetches in Options to keep merging new spots into the tree instead, so you build up a picture of a whole operating session. You can cap how long accumulated spots are kept, clear them on startup, or clear them on demand — all in Options.
Window size and position
PSK Heard By remembers where you put the window and how big it was, and restores that next launch.