Dear wfview Community,
It’s been a great year for wfview. From our initial website creation in March of 2021, you’ve seen wfview grow from a small program to “view the spectrum” to a full-fledged truly remote radio control suite, capable of operation with many different radios, with features rivaling many commercial software packages.
Part of this growth comes from you. Your ideas, bugs, and patches, have pushed wfview forward and helped it find direction among its users. Within this forum, hundreds of questions have been asked, and many users have contributed to both answers and questions, helping establish wfview as a true product of this community.
We’ve listened to your ideas, and there’s clearly a lot of room for growth. From additional operating modes, such as true CW and satellite, to additional radios, additional radio controls, audio processing, and even other platforms, we can all sense the strong and shared passion to press on and continue to create and explore what can be done with modern technology in the open source arena. Just a quick glance at youtube or twitter can show you the kinds of audiences, places, and applications that wfview is reaching.
One additional topic that we have received emails about lately is the opportunity to make donations to the project. Before we dive into it, I want to affirm that the wfview team is committed to keeping wfview free and open source. You’ll never have to pay for wfview. wfview isn’t going to become shareware or be sold to anyone. With that said, we’ve had enough people ask about donating that we think it might be very motivating for us to open the doors for your donations. Motivation is key with open source development. We, the developer team, all have full-time jobs in related fields and many of us have young families. The time we put into wfview is entirely driven by our passion for ham radio. If you want to help fuel that passion, by all means, we’re open to it.
Today we are pleased to announce that wfview now has a page on Patreon where you can support the project for as little as $2 per month. You can’t even buy a gallon of gasoline or a cup of coffee for $2, but it’d mean a lot to us to see your support at that level. We’re also putting some other levels out there for those that want to really show their love for wfview. All levels receive the same benefits:
- Free copies of wfview
- Behind the scenes screenshots and notes on development
- Access to our developer-only daily wfview builds for windows (and possibly macOS and Linux).
- Knowing that you’re supporting the software that we share a common passion for.
Overall, the Patreon membership is designed as a conduit for your support to the project. We don’t have much that we can offer back since wfview is already free! (Do you want T-shirts and mugs? Mouse pads?)
Here is a link to our Patreon:
We also want to announce that we’re going to open weekly wfview builds for windows for everyone. This is basically a byproduct of the nightly build process, but hopefully at a slightly more stable pace. Weekly builds will be available here for your download, provided approximately every Monday at 3 AM PDT (11 AM GMT):
https://www.wfview.org/public_builds/
For the automated weekly and daily builds, you’ll need to already have a copy of wfview installed and running, and understand that while we make a best-effort to keep wfview stable, these nightly and weekly builds may contain unusual bugs and/or behavior, so please use them at your own risk. Generally though, you’ll find new features and see the minor bugs go away and new ones appear.
This year was filled with challenges and changes for everyone. I hope you all have a good chance to spend time with your families and perhaps wind down a bit during the holidays. Being together seems more important than ever these days.
And so on behalf of the wfview team, from our desks to yours, happy holidays.
Sincerely,
Elliott, W6EL
Jim, PA8E
Phil, M0VSE
Roeland, PA3MET
If you’d like to view a presentation on wfview’s big year, see this: