Reelscope

Reelscope (Fishing)

Your Valar Scope can also run as a fishing‑conditions console for your water — covering both freshwater and saltwater, all from free, keyless public feeds. Its hero is an on‑device solunar "best bite times" band: the round screen becomes a 24‑hour dial marking the day's major and minor feeding windows, worked out from the Sun and Moon for your exact location with no network at all. On top of that it layers the live numbers anglers actually watch — river gauge or tide state, water temperature, and the barometric trend.

It's a separate firmware build for the same Valar Scopes hardware: flash the Reelscope firmware and the device boots into the fishing console instead of the radar. Everything else you already know carries over — Wi‑Fi setup, the web config page, persistent storage, over‑the‑air updates, and ntfy alerts. Reelscope is the newest edition, so its live‑data screens are still landing stage by stage; the solunar bite forecast at its core is fully on‑device and works the moment you set a location.

Where the data comes from. The bite windows, Moon phase, and sunrise/sunset are computed on‑device from the NTP clock and your configured location (the same sun/moon ephemeris Orbitscope uses), so they need no feed at all. The live screens pull from free, keyless public sources: freshwater gauges from USGS Water Services (keyed by your gauge's site number); saltwater tides and water temperature from NOAA CO‑OPS tide stations, with offshore waves from NDBC buoys; and basic weather / barometer from Open‑Meteo. There is no backend, no account, and no API key — nothing is baked in and nothing is required. It polls gently — one request in flight at a time, each feed on its own timer with exponential backoff — and keeps the last good reading through a network hiccup.

🖥️ The screens

Reelscope uses the hybrid shell (like Quillscope): the enabled dials auto‑rotate on a dwell timer (skipping any feed with no data yet), and you can also swipe left/right by hand. Tap any dial to inspect it in a detail card. There's no PPI sweep — the bite dial is a static 24‑hour ring. Every screen can be toggled on or off in config, so a freshwater angler and a saltwater angler each see only what's relevant.

Screen	What it shows
🎣 Bite	The hero. A 24‑hour ring (midnight at the top, clockwise) marking the day's major and minor feeding windows — from the Moon's rise, set, and overhead/underfoot transits, blended with sunrise/sunset — with the next window, a live "active now" read, and a day rating. Tap a window marker for its detail card.
🏞️ River (freshwater)	Your gauge's height and streamflow (CFS) with a rising / steady / falling trend, water temperature, and turbidity where the site reports it — from your chosen USGS site number. (Hidden unless a USGS gauge is set.)
🌊 Tides (saltwater)	The local tide state from your NOAA CO‑OPS station — the next high or low and a countdown to it, so you can time the moving water. (Hidden unless a tide station is set.)
🌡️ Water & waves	Water temperature and, offshore, wave height / swell period from the nearest NDBC buoy.
📉 Barometer	The sea‑level pressure and its trend over recent hours — the number anglers watch, since a fast drop ahead of a front often turns the bite on.
🌙 Moon	The Moon phase and percent illumination that drive the solunar strength — a full or new Moon sharpens the majors.
☀️ Sun	Sunrise and sunset (and twilight) for your location — the dawn and dusk edges most bites cluster around.
📓 Catch log	Your logged catches, kept across reboots in their own storage — a running tally you can build over a season.
✨ Splash / 🕑 Clock	A welcome card on cold start (with a setup hint until a location is set), and an idle UTC clock that honours the night auto‑dim.

🚨 Alerts

Reelscope can push phone notifications via ntfy (see Alerts and Watchlist for how ntfy works). Set a topic and pick which triggers fire — each independently toggleable, and all edge‑seeded at boot so a condition already true at startup never pings you, only fresh events:

• Bite window opening — a major feeding window is starting, so you can be on the water for it.
• River flow threshold — your gauge's streamflow crosses a level you set (fishable / blown‑out), for freshwater anglers.
• Water temperature band — the water enters your species' active‑feeding temperature range.

On boards with a buzzer, an optional chime can sound alongside the notification. Leave the topic blank to disable all phone alerts.

⚙️ Configuration

Everything is set from the same web page as the radar — Configuration Reference explains how to open it. The Reelscope build's page offers:

Setting	Description
Location	Latitude / longitude — the basis for the solunar windows, the Sun and Moon rise/set, and the day/night auto‑dim. Required before the bite forecast runs.
Water type	Freshwater, saltwater, or both — which live screens the device rotates through.
USGS gauge	A USGS Water Services site number for the freshwater river screen and its flow alert (leave blank for salt‑only).
NOAA station / buoy	A NOAA CO‑OPS tide station (and optional NDBC buoy id) for the saltwater tide, water‑temperature, and wave screens (leave blank for fresh‑only).
Units	Imperial (ft / °F / mph / inHg / CFS) or metric (m / °C / km/h / hPa / m³s⁻¹).
ntfy.sh topic + triggers	Phone‑alert topic and the per‑trigger toggles (bite window / river flow threshold / water‑temp band), plus the chime‑on‑alert toggle. Blank topic = all alerts off.
Palette / Brightness / Auto‑dim	The colour theme and the same backlight and night‑dim controls as the radar.
Screens — order & enable	A comma‑separated list of screen ids in rotation order; omit one to hide it, leave blank to show all. (A listed screen still only appears once its feed has data.)

Changes apply live on Save, with no reboot — same as the radar.

⬆️ Getting it & updates

Reelscope is its own firmware image on its own update channel, so a device set up as Reelscope only ever pulls Reelscope firmware (and a radar device only pulls radar firmware) — the products never cross. Over‑the‑air updates otherwise work exactly as on the radar; see Firmware Updates.

Related

• Configuration Reference — opening the web config page
• Alerts and Watchlist — how ntfy phone alerts work
• Screens and Gestures — the swipe/tap model this edition shares with the radar
• Clock and Brightness — the auto‑dim this edition honours
• Network and Setup — Wi‑Fi setup
• Quakescope · Quillscope · Orbitscope · Missileer — its sibling editions