JTCAT no longer talks to its own echo, Intel Macs get their fast decoder back, and a new Event Focus lens shows only the contest you're chasing.
👻 FT8 phantom QSOs — fixed
Thanks N3VD: if your radio loops transmit audio back to the computer (an IC-7300 with MONI on is the classic), JTCAT could decode its own transmission, mistake it for the other station's reply, and "complete" the QSO — logging your sent report as the received one (RST sent and received identical, every time) while the real contact never finished. Two independent guards now prevent it:
- The decoder drops any decode that matches the message you're currently transmitting — and tells you in the CAT log to check your MONI / USB loopback settings, since hearing your own echo usually means the radio is set up for voice, not digital.
- The QSO state machine only accepts messages actually addressed to you (
YOURCALL THEIRCALL …) — which also hardens Skip Grid and Fox/Hound flows against cross-QSO confusion. - Bonus fix from the same investigation: a straggling
RR73can no longer start a phantom new QSO with "RR73" recorded as a grid square.
🍎 Intel Macs: your fast FT8 decoder is back
The same bug report exposed a build problem: GitHub retired their Intel macOS build machines, and the x64 mac app has been silently shipping an Apple-Silicon FT8 decoder that Intel Macs can't load — falling back to a decoder slow enough that transmissions started seconds late every cycle. The Intel build is now properly cross-compiled, and the release pipeline verifies the decoder's architecture and refuses to publish if it's ever wrong again. If you run POTACAT on an Intel Mac (or installed the Intel build on an Apple-Silicon Mac), this update matters.
🎯 Event Focus — chase one contest, see nothing else
When a tracked event is running (like this weekend's WRTC 2026), a colored chip appears at the head of the Spots filter row. Click it and the list shows only that event's stations — from every source, even ones you've toggled off, with a banner making the state impossible to forget. Your filters aren't changed underneath; exit and everything is exactly as you left it. For checklist events, a Needed only toggle hides stations you've already worked — but keeps them visible when they're spotted on a band or mode you haven't logged yet. Focus ends itself when the event does. Same behavior as the ECHOCAT mobile app shipped this week, so both screens agree on what "focused" means.
📊 Kenwood meters read true (TS-480 and friends)
Real Kenwoods report their meters on a much smaller scale than everything assumed — S9 rendered as about S1, transmit power looked anemic, and SWR showed nothing at all (a second bug truncated Kenwood meter replies to a tenth of their value). Both fixed at the source, so the desktop meters, the web remote, and the phone all read correctly at once. TS-890S/990S owners: your radios use yet another meter range and got their own calibration — if your S-meter looks off, tell us.
📱 For ECHOCAT phone users
- Flex SWR reaches the phone — the status snapshot now carries the true SWR ratio, so connecting mid-session shows SWR immediately, and it clears a few seconds after transmit ends instead of sticking forever.
- Hold TX arrives on the desktop JTCAT popout — the phone has had it for a while; now the desktop popout has the same button (keep your TX audio frequency fixed instead of following each station), with the two staying in sync. Also fixed: in multi-slice, the desktop toggle now reaches the engine that's actually transmitting.
- Groundwork for a "re-crawl" button — the phone will be able to tell the desktop to refresh the event catalog on demand (new contests appear within seconds instead of the 4-hour cycle). Desktop side is ready; watch for the next app update.
Windows, macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), and Linux (x64 + arm64) installers are attached below; the app auto-updates from here.