WWFF no longer found

[jwiegel]

Today found that WWFF spots no longer are found in devD.

I knew a WWFF activation was active, but not found in Hunerlog so I visted https://spots.wwff.co/static/spots.json and found the active spot.

In the logfile I found several lines like this:

2026-06-23 14:42:52,937 = WARNING [programs.wwff_program]: wwff spots object is Null

Looking at the log for previous days these lines are there everytime.

Looking in src I found you are using https://www.cqgma.org/api/spots/wwff/ which now gives the warning an API key is needed.

[cwhelchel]

Thanks for the heads up. I rarely hunt them so I didn't notice they weren't showing up. I'll get an api key and get it updated

[PHP-GLOBE]

Looking back in my log the lasttime I logged WWFF via Hunterlog was 20260527

Proberly due to this facebook post Google found for me

We recently noticed extremely high traffic on the GMA WWFF/GMA Spot API caused by many individual HamClock installations polling our servers directly.
Please understand:
GMA provides this API free of charge for the amateur radio community.
The system was designed for reasonable spot sharing — not for thousands of independent clients continuously requesting the same data.
From now on, the API is rate limited to:

maximum 1 request per minute per client
maximum 1440 requests per day

This is fully sufficient, because GMA itself also updates external spot sources only once per minute.
We kindly ask software developers and service operators to cache GMA spot data centrally instead of letting every single installation access our servers directly.
A shared cache/proxy model would greatly reduce unnecessary server load and help keep the service stable and free for everyone.
Thank you for your understanding and support.

[cwhelchel]

Oh ok. This may be fallout from the untimely end of HamClock which used its own backend service. It probably counted as the shared cache/proxy model they mention at the end. I think there may be more

I think I should provide the same for Hunterlog clients. That means I have to:

1. Get an API KEY. I've sent a request via their 'Contact Support' button
2. Stand up an API to proxy calls to cqgma.org/api/spots/wwff/ with an API key

for ref but its for a diff part of api:
https://www.cqgma.org/doc/index.php?file=reference_activations_api.md

[PHP-GLOBE]

Or start using ttps://spots.wwff.co/static/spots.json without API
I use this url for my own filtered cluster just showing BOTA/COTA/POTA/SOTA/WWFF (collected from DX cluster and from different API's

[cwhelchel]

Hah if I knew that a few days ago I wouldn't have stood up a new API. It's WIP but I already bought the domain hunterlog.us and setup some Google cloud services. I'll build and deploy a HL that uses but ill release it quietly (send me an email - qrz.com/db/N9FZ) and discord. B/c I want to see how the cloud costs will be before a full release.