A few days ago I was posed a question by some friends who happen to currently be ARRL section leaders for Colorado.

This year the ARRL has a special event called Volunteers On The Air, VOTA. As part of that program, each section will have a couple of week-long blocks at at points through the year to operate with the callsign “W1AW portable,” which is a very special honor! However, each section needs to organize their own operators.

So coming up in May, we need to have skilled Colorado operators lined up to take shifts to operate as many bands and modes as possible for 7 consecutive days. However, the ARRL didn’t perscribe how exactly we should manage those logistics. There’s an online tool available that was developed by another section, but my friends weren’t impressed; it’s sort of a “Contact Us” form with a text field for the operator’s callsign and dropdowns for their requested date, time, band and mode. Submitting the form sends the information to who-knows-where, operators have to fill out this form once for each shift they pick up, and have no visibility as to who else might want to operate at that time.

My friends thought maybe Colorado could come up with something better. And I agree.

So I’ve spent the past few days building a web app basically from scratch, but leveraging some of my work on Forester. The new app will also be written in Angular Typescript and use Firebase for storage and cloud functions. The basic idea is for operators to sign up with an account and get approved by one of the section leaders. Once they’re approved, they can view the entire shift schedule by day, band and mode. They can see who’s operating around them, and they can reserve shifts (or cancel) with a single click. And because I’m using Firestore’s realtime capabilities, users can watch the shifts get reserved and freed up immediately without a page refresh.

The tool is still pretty early in development, but I feel like we’ve already leveled up over what’s out there. Plus, it’s open-source, so other sections can adopt it if they’re interested. Check out my W1AW/0 Colorado Scheduler on GitHub.