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Artemis: A GNOME Desktop App for Hunting Parks on the Air
Back in September, I moved to Linux full-time on my home desktop — Arch and GNOME 48, to be exact.
I was really impressed with GNOME and its direction. I try to build software for whatever platform I’m living on, and it had been forever since I’d built a GTK app. I remembered it being pretty involved. I had a couple of false starts with C and GTK4, but now there’s libadwaita and Vala. I was really impressed with what elementary OS has built using Vala and libadwaita. So I built an app with libadwaita and Vala.
I’m a Parks on the Air hunter. It’s a fox-and-hound activity where one amateur radio operator (yes, a ham) sets up in a state or national park. They call out for hunters to find them. When they log ten hunters, the park is considered “activated” and added to their tally. This happens every day, all over the world. Next time you’re at a state park on the weekend, look around. You might see a car or truck with some wires leading to an antenna hung in a tree or set up on the ground. You just found an activator in the flesh.
So what does this have to do with apps? I don’t have much time to activate these days, but I do find myself with time to hunt. Hunters can find parks by scanning the bands, just looking for folks to talk with. Or they can use the spots page on the official POTA website. I’m more of the second type. I want to know which bands are the most active and how I can stretch my setup. Can I hear that station in New York from LA? Turns out I can. It’s a lot of fun.
So my app is a desktop client for accessing POTA spots. I can search and filter by band, park, country, operator, etc. I added a map view so I can see states or countries I’d like to add and pounce on activators that way. It also integrates with Hamlib so I can control my radio directly from the app. Found an activator? Click “Tune” and my radio flips to the correct band and frequency.
It’s called Artemis, after the goddess of the hunt. I may or may not have been playing a lot of Hades while building this.
It’s been a lot of fun getting this app ready for release. It’s available as source on GitHub or via Flathub.
If you’re a ham and you’ve stumbled across this, I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think.