I’ve been experimenting with integrating rotator control into WRL and thought I’d share a simple working approach as a feature idea.
Using the WRL logging interface, when a spot is clicked the app populates the contact fields (callsign and grid). I’m using a small browser-side script to watch those fields for changes, calculate bearing from my QTH, and send the azimuth to a local rotator controller.
This allows WRL spot clicks to drive beam heading without native rotator support.
It works reliably as long as a grid is present, and could be extended with callsign lookup as a fallback.
It feels like WRL already has all the required data internally, so a native implementation (e.g. optional “turn rotator on spot click”) would be a natural fit.
This is REALLY cool!! Thanks for sharing! We are planning on creating some APIs and other ways to access our platform easier, let us know if we can help in any way.
What I’ve built at the moment is a local listener that takes spot data from WRL and automatically drives a rotator in real time — including handling no-grid spots via QRZ lookup (lat/long or grid).
If/when you release APIs, I’d definitely be keen to integrate against those rather than reading from the UI directly.
Happy to share more detail or help test anything you guys are working on.
That’s a great addition to an already amazing platform.
Just a question/idea: I beleive the Auto Track On can be toggled so rotor dont rotate automatically unless you expressly decide to, right? In my past experience (specially in digital modes where conditions can be open to everywhere, I found myself clicking USA and the next minute EU, then AF, then PAC and that could put some burden on the Rotator. So the idea of being able to enable/disable Auto Rotate and adding a GO button would be helpful.
