By Cale Mooth (K4HCK) Amateur Radio Daily
Anthony (KA9NWM), the creator of Helioclock, was kind enough to send along the Live USB Stick version of Helioclock for me to review. I’ve been evaluating Helioclock in my shack and home office over the last two weeks.
There has been a deluge of ham radio focused, situational awareness “dashboards” that have entered the market over the past several months. Some are free and some cost hundreds of dollars. I’ve been a HamClock user for many years, and full disclosure, I’ve contributed code to the Open Ham Clock Backend project to help keep HamClock running. I’ve also been a regular user of Open Ham Clock since it was released earlier this year. There are many others including DXLook, Ham Radio dashboard, HamDash, 73QRZ, HAM-HQ, and on and on. Most aren’t great. A few are very good.
Until recently, there were only two main players in the situational awareness dashboard space and that was Geochron and HamClock. Geochron is the gold standard, exquisitely crafted (and very pricey), while HamClock provides similar information in a more utilitarian package at the low price of free.
Where does Helioclock fit on the spectrum? A beautiful and well-designed display piece that gives Geochron a run for both its price and design.
Setting up and customizing Helioclock
For this review I ran Helioclock on my old gaming rig with 16GB of RAM and a graphics card capable of pushing the full 4K experience to a 55 inch 4K television. Helioclock’s minimum specs support a Raspberry Pi 4, so it should be quite capable on a range of hardware.
Helioclock was easy to set up using the Live USB Stick. I plugged it into my rig, pointed the BIOS at the USB stick, and everything just worked. Without a single click or press of a key, a default version of Helioclock starts up, ready to be customized.
I tend to blindly click around in these initial states simply exploring and trying to figure things out for myself. Initial customization steps aren’t incredibly intuitive so I would recommend at least glancing at the documentation and getting some queues from the keyboard shortcuts section.
Muscle memory sets in quickly, but then you’re presented with a new challenge: The sheer amount of potential information and widgets to display.
I won’t list every data point that Helioclock provides, but if you can imagine it, it’s probably there. I’ll call out a few that are unique or presented in a unique way:
- Tropical storms including tracking cones
- Visible Planets
- Best Band Now
- FAA Weathercams
After using Helioclock for a few days it becomes clear that there are two main user types that this device is catering to. Hams, and non-hams that may be interested in weather, planetary events, news, and astronomy. Helioclock provides a pulse on all of these things. The weather focus makes sense considering the author’s background as a meteorologist and producer of weather graphics and systems for broadcast television.
I’m rarely on the air with my ham activities. (Too much time spent sifting through content on the internet for my weekly amateur radio newsletter.) As a result, I gravitated more toward the weather and planetary event aspect of Helioclock, eventually turning off most of the ham radio related information. (All the ham info is there. DX spots, PSKreporter integration, WSJT-X integration, POTA, SOTA, satellites, and more.)
The result is a beautiful world map with plenty of eye candy, from lightning strikes to aurora, tropical storms, and a news crawl of my favorite news sites. (You can import any news source with an RSS feed.) At a glance from across the room, Helioclock feels polished, looks professional, and is quite visually interesting. It’s a wonderful addition to a techie space such as a ham shack, home office, or even a corporate environment. It looks like an interface you might find in a sci-fi movie, and absolutely worth the $40 to get started.
Let’s talk design
I was a designer in a previous career (including designing graphics for broadcast television!) and to this day I can’t avoid looking at everything with a designer’s eye. I notice every little detail and many times I wish I didn’t. Most readers of this section won’t notice or care about what I’m pointing out. For the slim percentage of you that do, it’s not a deal-breaker.
There are some picky issues such as the satellite imagery not spanning the full map (due to NOAA sats not covering the poles) and the lack of smooth scrolling of the news feed. (This can probably be fixed with some fancy CSS hacks.) The overall style is very “high-tech,” even movie UI-esque, but it also looks like a lot of the AI generated web applications out there in terms of color and typographic choices. This one is better than most, but if that style knocks you over every time you see it, be prepared. To be fair, in this context, that style can work really well.
The only major design issue I struggle with is whether Helioclock should be viewed from across the room, or up close on a desk. I don’t think Helioclock has figured that out quite yet. Maybe the intent is both. For example, sitting at my workstation, Helioclock is three feet away on a 55 inch 4K TV. The map looks great and is readable. I can pick out every state and country, timezones, POTA spots, etc. What I can’t read is most of the information in the panels. The typography is set very small. The information panels, including the clocks, are completely illegible across the room. (Sizing can be adjusted by reducing the resolution to 1080 or simply hitting control+plus on the keyboard.)
Conversely, standing next to the TV, I can read everything, to the point where I have to physically move my head to take everything in. I’d be very curious to try Helioclock on a small monitor next to my desk and see if that might be a better experience for me since I’m interested in the information within the panels.
If the goal is eye candy across the room, none of this really applies.
Helioclock vs. HamClock vs. Geochron
There’s really no comparison between Helioclock and HamClock other than they present a lot of the same data points. HamClock feels dated and archaic next to Helioclock’s modern design and high resolution maps. It’s 1996 vs. 2036.
The most interesting comparison in my view is Helioclock vs. Geochron. Helioclock is very much a contender with the Geochron offering, especially in terms of visual presentation and available data layers. Helioclock provides a very similar experience at $500 less and no recurring subscription for additional data layers. If I were Geochron, I’d be watching Helioclock closely, especially with regard to Atlas.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Helioclock and Geochron at Hunstville Hamfest:
Final thoughts
This review really only scratches the surface of what Helioclock is capable of. If I had more time I’d go much deeper into the ham radio related data points and the SDR integration that is also a key feature. Perhaps another review is in store for the future.
Overall, Helioclock is one of if not the best situational awareness display available. While not free, it really is a steal at $40 if you have an old PC or Raspberry Pi laying around. A fully purpose-built appliance for individual and multiple displays starts at $369 at the time of this writing. I highly recommend picking one up!
Source: Amateur Radio Daily
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