Spacetrucker Galactic

Live Kp, SFI, aurora flag, POTA & SOTA spots, DX cluster, magnetic declination, APRS — plus sun, moon, marine, and weather. One brief, your location. On-device.

Your space-weather and RF brief, wherever you set up the rig.

Galactic is a daily almanac for amateur radio operators, space-weather watchers, and anyone who keeps an antenna outside. It pulls the forecasts and ephemerides that normally live in eight separate browser tabs into one quiet view, tuned to your location.

FOR RADIO OPERATORS

• HF propagation summary. Live planetary Kp, A index, and 10.7 cm solar flux (SFI) from NOAA SWPC, plus a plain-English read on band conditions and noise floor.

• Aurora-likelihood flag. Kp-driven heads-up when the auroral oval is pushing south and HF is about to get interesting.

• DX cluster. Recent DX spots so you can see what's audible right now — without firing up a separate client.

• Parks On The Air & Summits On The Air. Live spots sorted by distance, with a detail page for each — distance and bearing from your QTH, frequency, mode, comments, and a map pin where the spot carries coordinates.

• Magnetic declination at your location, computed on-device against the World Magnetic Model — for beam headings and portable directional antennas.

• APRS callsign tracking. Save your friends' callsigns; one tap pulls their last-known position from aprs.fi (your read key, your account), with APRS-symbol icons and path-derived DX stats.

SPACE WEATHER, SUN, AND SKY

• Sunrise, sunset, golden-hour windows, and the three twilight transitions (civil, nautical, astronomical) on a 24-hour color strip.

• Moon phase, illumination, and procedural surface features rendered on a starfield — Mare Imbrium, Tranquillitatis, Tycho, the rest of the near-side face.

• Ten planetary positions (Sun, Moon, Mercury through Pluto) in zodiac signs at their current degree, computed locally with Meeus's formulas.

• Upcoming launches. Next five orbital launches from The Space Devs.

WEATHER, FOR THE REST OF THE KIT

• Earth weather. Six-period NWS forecast for your coordinates.

• Marine forecasts. NWS coastal-zone bulletins (GMZ, AMZ, PZZ, AN, …) parsed as readable periods with seas, wind, and weather.

WHERE THE BRIEF LIVES

• Home-screen widget — small and medium sizes with current temperature, sun events, Kp, and moon phase at a glance.

• Apple Watch app with five glance cards and four complication families (circular, corner, inline, rectangular).

• Local notifications for golden hour and astronomical dusk, scheduled fourteen days ahead.

BUILT FOR THE FIELD

Galactic runs entirely on your device. No backend, no accounts, no analytics, no third-party SDKs. Outbound requests go only to NOAA, NWS, aprs.fi, The Space Devs, POTA, SOTA, and the DX cluster — the public services that produce the data. Your aprs.fi API key is yours, stored in iOS UserDefaults on this device only.

73 — de SpaceTrucker.

What's New in This Version (4000 char max — 1,170 used)

v0.2 — Standalone

• Galactic now runs entirely on your device. Every data source is fetched directly from its public origin; nothing is routed through a Galactic server.

• Brand-new RF tab leading with the radio-operator story: HF propagation, aurora flag, POTA, SOTA, DX cluster, magnetic declination, APRS callsign tracking and receive-only messaging.

• POTA & SOTA detail pages — distance and bearing from your QTH, frequency, mode, comments, and a map pin where coordinates are available.

• Moon surface features rendered on the moon hero — Mare Imbrium, Tranquillitatis, Procellarum, Tycho, and the rest of the near-side face.

• Apple Watch app with five glance cards and four complication families.

• Apple Maps deep linking from any callsign's last-known position.

• Local notifications for golden hour and astronomical dusk, scheduled fourteen days ahead.

• Accessibility: the Sun day strip reads sunrise, sunset, and the current twilight phase to VoiceOver. Every tab's interactive surface now has stable identifiers and labels.

• Haptic feedback on refresh, success, and error.