New contests appear in POTACAT the moment we publish them — no app update required — starting with WRTC 2026 this weekend.
🏆 WRTC 2026 — this weekend, ready out of the box
The World Radiosport Team Championship runs inside the IARU HF Championship, Saturday 12:00 UTC to Sunday 12:00 UTC (July 11–12): 50 two-operator teams at identical stations in South East England, CW and SSB on 80/40/20/15/10m. POTACAT tracks it like 13 Colonies:
- All 50 competitor callsigns (MB1A–MB7W) get a red WRTC badge on every spot — table and map — the moment the contest opens.
- A 50-station checklist board tracks who you've worked (team identities are sealed until after the contest, so it's a callsign chase — as intended).
- Every WRTC QSO you log is stamped into the ADIF record, and the board's Export button now produces your complete WRTC log — every band and mode, not one line per station — ready for the award tiers (up to 500 QSOs if you sweep it).
- It shows in the Contests view with a LIVE pill and a chip that jumps straight to your board.
📡 Contests now arrive over the air
The plumbing behind the WRTC entry is the bigger story: special events and one-shot contests are now published from potacat.com and appear in the app within a few hours — spot badges, tracking board, Contests view listing, QSO stamping, and log export, all of it. Once fetched, everything is cached and works fully offline, so set up at home and the contest rides along to the park. (The recurring calendar — CQ WW, Field Day, and friends — is still built in.)
🎪 Event polish
- Badges know when to quit. Event badges on spots now retire 24 hours after the event ends. Short special-event callsigns get reissued to unrelated operations within days — no more last-week's badge on this week's station.
- Full-fidelity event exports. The per-event ADIF export used to include one QSO per checklist station; it now exports every stamped contact with all original fields.
🪵 Logger bar, unsquished
If a callsign's QRZ name was a whole club charter ("The Holmesburg Amateur Radio Club of Greater…"), it shoved the grid, distance, and heading clean off the screen. The name now trims itself with an ellipsis while grid / distance / heading stay right-justified beside the frequency box.
⚡ JTCAT: stuck QSOs end gracefully
Thanks KQ4MHD: when a partner kept repeating a message that couldn't advance the QSO, JTCAT would retry forever. Retries are now a hard per-phase cap (the tries setting, now in the popout for everyone) — and when reports have been exchanged both ways, the QSO logs and sends one final courtesy 73 instead of vanishing mid-conversation. In run mode it goes straight back to CQ.
🛠️ Also in this release
- Bug reports capture everything since launch. Report a Bug now includes the full session log from startup (with a marker at the moment you filed), not just the last few minutes — and paths that would leak your username are scrubbed.
- Mobile groundwork: the phone now receives server-published contests in its settings payload, so the ECHOCAT apps can list them as soon as their next update lands.
Windows, macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), and Linux (x64 + arm64) installers are attached below; the app auto-updates from here.