With last month's tragic death of HamClock developer, Elwood Downey, WBØOEW, the clock is ticking - quite literally - on a way to salvage this popular shack accessory so it remains useful beyond its scheduled sunset in June.

Brian Wilkins, KO4AQF, the developer of an open-source alternative, has posted his work-in-progress on the GitHub website in the hopes of providing realtime HamClock data feeds from publicly available locations, such as PSK reporter, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The final iteration of HamClock is version 4.22. With no further maintenance possible on its Internet backend, news, propagation updates, DX and other data will no longer be delivered to the device after it sunsets.

Brian was not involved in the creation of the original HamClock but said that this replacement project, a free, open-source, Linux-based system, is an outgrowth of [quote] "my own motivation and passion." [endquote]

He told Newsline in an email that [quote] "the goal is preservation, not reinvention - keeping HamClock working exactly as intended for years to come." [endquote]

To see the work that is under way, follow the link in the text version of this week's Newsline script at arnewsline.org