Defining HamAlert's 'Market Position' or USP (Unique Selling Point)

[chrisdebian]

The beauty of the experimental nature of Amateur Radio, and the design principles of open source projects, is that people are regularly having ideas for new apps. One that I am enjoying is FieldSpotter.

It would be useful to understand what open source apps exist, and to confirm whether the evolving functionality of HamAlert is duplicating something that already exists. In this case, the sensible approach would be to build on existing work, rather than re-inventing the wheel. Key to this, is understanding what HamAlert is, and equally importantly, what it isn't.

These are the apps that I can think of, can anyone add to this?

1. FieldSpotter.
2. POTA app
3. Ham-Map
4. Grid.Radio
5. SOTLAS
6. ...

Do the above apps duplicate any current HamAlert functionality, or do they influence HamAlert's development roadmap (yet to be written)?

Thanks,

Chris

[manuelkasper]

I would say the USP of HamAlert is that it actively send push notifications according to very specific criteria set by the user, i.e. not simply displaying an updated/refreshing filtered list of spots that the user has to check manually.

The apps that you listed above don't seem to send any notifications. Another app I can think of is SOTA Goat (iOS only), which can send push notifications for SOTAwatch spots. But this is very limited in that it only supports SOTA, and there is only a small set of filter/trigger criteria.

I'm not aware of another application that generically handles all kinds of amateur radio spots, filters them according to user-defined criteria, and sends notifications over various channels like HamAlert.

[chrisdebian]

This sounds like a pretty good definition to me, and we're not stepping on the toes of other apps.

Chris

[chrisdebian]

Just adding PoLo to the list, in case we can learn anything from another open source project.