HamDashboard de VA3HDL

 Jason, KM4ACK, has done it again. He's shown another really cool ham thing on his YT page - a ham-friendly dashboard!

If you're looking for a way to have ALL your ham radio internet-linked things at your fingertips, look no further than VA3HDL's Ham Radio Dashboard. All you need is a web browser to get started.

Overview

Ham Dashboard was constructed by Pablo, VA3HDL. When you open the initial HTML page from his GitHub page, you'll be greeted with weather radar images, satellite cloud cover maps, propagation for 10m, and so much more!!! Did you know you can also customize this to your liking??? Mine has remote access to my AllStar node via Supermon, the N2YO satellite database, and the homepage for my local National Weather Service office.

So, what are you waiting for? Let's get started!

Download and Unpack

To fetch Ham Dashboard, you'll need to visit Pablo's GitHub here: https://github.com/va3hdl/hamdashboard. Find the green "Code" button and select "Download Zip". Unzip and unpack this folder into your folder of choice.

Next, open up the hamdash.html file to preview the preloaded dashboard. You may find that there are some things that you don't need. This dashboard also features items on the sidebars - just hover over the right or left of the page to reveal them. We can also change these too using a configurable JSON file, which is cleverly titled "config.js".

Modify the Dashboard

We'll want to change the first line of code. Here's what mine looks like:

const topBarCenterText = `KE0SBX - EN20ni`;

You'll need to change yours to look like mine, except replace 'KE0SBX - EN20ni' with '[your_callsign] - [your_gridsquare]'. See? It's easy!

Okay, let's change one of the maps. We'll change the "Lightning Local" map to the Severe Weather Outlook for day 1. First, copy this link: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/day1otlk.gif. This is the GIF file that we'll use on the dashboard. Next, scroll down in the JSON file in the "Dashboard Items" area and find the piece of data that has "Lightning Local". It should be 5th from the bottom. Here is what the data could look like:

[

    "SEVERE WEATHER OUTLOOK",

    "https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/day1otlk.gif",

  ],

Note that in the first line, we have our image title. Below that is the image source. This works for any and all images, and in fact, you can copy and paste the line above to get the SWO product! Just copy and replace the line where you'd like. Here is an example from my JSON file:

Modify the Menu

Just like the dashboard, we can modify our menu items. Below is an example from my JSON file:

[

    "2196F3",

    "WEATHER",

    "https://www.weather.gov/eax/",

    "1",

    "R",

  ],

As you can see, 2196F3 is the button color, "WEATHER" is the tab's title, the next line is the link to the menu item, 1 is the zoom level, and R means aligned to the right. You can change these values to whatever you'd like. Above displays a menu item that takes me to the Kansas City - Pleasant Hill NWS office homepage.

This tool is really cool and is so handy to have around! You should be able to run this on any computer that utilizes HTML/JSON protocols. If you want to find the full review video by Jason, KM4ACK, you can find it here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZZXg60tN-o.