Weak Signal Sleuth

Weak Signal Sleuth is a desktop early-warning system for VHF band openings, built around one job: telling you the moment 6 meters opens in your local area. The magic band comes alive without warning — a sporadic-E cloud can light up 50 MHz for minutes and be gone before you ever look at the rig. Sleuth watches the spotting networks for you and sounds the alarm the instant your area starts to open.

Built with Tauri v2 + React (a Rust backend behind a web UI), it ships as a native Windows .exe with a tiny footprint.

Primary: 6-meter openings, local to you

Sleuth’s whole focus is 50 MHz propagation near your QTH. Instead of showing you DX on the other side of the planet, it watches for the tell-tale signs that 6 meters is opening into and out of your region — then fires a desktop notification so you can drop what you’re doing and get on the band before the opening fades.

Secondary: 2-meter openings

The same engine watches 144 MHz, flagging tropo and sporadic-E openings on 2 meters so you catch the rarer VHF runs as conditions lift.

Third: meteor scatter activity

Sleuth also surfaces meteor-scatter activity — the brief, pinging reflections that let VHF operators complete contacts far beyond the normal horizon — so you know when the rocks are working.

How it watches the bands

• Real-time spot intelligence — continuously polls PSKReporter and reads a DX Cluster over telnet, focused on VHF activity in and around your area.
• World-map visualization — plots spots and reception paths so you can see an opening form across nearby regions, not just read a list.
• Opening predictor (ML) — a lightweight model turns recent activity into an opening probability, weighing the signals that matter: spot volume, unique stations, reciprocal (two-way) paths, geographic spread, and time of day. Cross your threshold and it alerts.

Nothing here touches your radio — it’s an intelligence and alerting tool that tells you when 6m (or 2m, or the meteor scatter) is worth getting on. A tabbed workspace (Monitor, Map, ML, Logs, Settings) keeps the live feed, the map, and the model a click apart. Free and open source.