The Console

With voice bridged and the radios talking, the next problem was a quieter one: there was no way to see any of it. Services were running or they were not, and finding out meant logging in and poking around. That does not scale past a couple of pieces, and by now there were more than a couple.

So the next build was a console. A web dashboard, open on any device on the network, that shows the station’s health and lets you drive it.

A map, not a status page

The centerpiece is a live routing map. The station’s signal paths are drawn as a graph, each hop colored by health, and the active path lights up when traffic flows. A status list would carry the same facts, but a map shows you the shape of a problem at a glance. When a hop goes red, you see exactly where the chain broke instead of reading down a table.

It is built to be fast and to work offline, because the station has to work offline too. The full writeup is here: Building the Station Console.

Everything in one place

Around the map, the console grew the pages the station actually needs: HF propagation computed on the Pi (A Propagation Display That Runs on the Pi), host vitals and service control, and editing the station’s configuration safely from the browser without handing a web app root (Editing Privileged Configs From a Web UI, Safely).

With the station visible and controllable, the next move was to add a kind of radio it did not have yet.

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