I've been heads-down building while others have been busy posting. Some of what Keith and Udo are saying needs to be addressed directly, because the HamClock community deserves facts — not deception from people with a financial stake in where you point your clock.
Let me be blunt. Keith and Udo are not "promoting" OHB as an independent backend replacement. They are deceiving you. And the source of that deception is Brian and the OHB team, who are misrepresenting what their backend actually does. Keith and Udo are either knowingly repeating those lies, or they took Brian at his word without doing five minutes of technical verification. Pick whichever makes you more comfortable — the result is the same. You're being misled about what OHB is and what it can do.
OHB is proxying the majority of its feeds and maps from Elwood's original ClearSkyInstitute server. Their map overlays are pixel-for-pixel identical to CSI originals. Independently generated maps would never produce pixel-perfect matches — that's mathematically impossible. OHB has aurora and a MUF-RT overlay built from publicly available code, but the rendering quality is poor and the rest is proxied. OHB cannot do satellite tracking. OHB is, for most of what matters, a forwarding address pretending to be a backend.
I'm implementing anti-proxy protections on hamclock.com to prevent anyone from silently relaying my output and passing it off as their own work. If OHB or anyone else is piggybacking off my server, that door is closing.
What this means: every HamClock pointed at OHB today is one CSI shutdown away from losing most of its functionality. You think you've migrated to safety. You haven't. When ClearSkyInstitute goes dark — and it will, because nobody is maintaining it — OHB goes with it. That's not a risk. That's a certainty.
Compare OHB's map output to CSI's originals yourself. Pixel for pixel. I'll wait.
While Keith and Udo were writing Facebook posts, I was engineering. Here's what happened in the last 24 hours:
PSK Reporter live spot streaming. I built a real-time stream ingester pulling directly from PSK Reporter's backend infrastructure — not the public XML query that CSI used. A live firehose of spots flowing into a local database at 400+ spots per second, queryable by any HamClock in under 100ms. Neither CSI's original implementation nor OHB has anything like this.
VOACAP propagation engine. Running locally with cubic interpolation, generating MUF, reliability, and area maps dynamically — per user, per request — based on each HamClock's location, frequency, power, and time of day. These are not static images sitting on a disk. Every time your HamClock asks for a propagation map, my server runs the VOACAP prediction engine in real time and renders a map unique to your station. Written from scratch. Not proxied.
All map overlays independently generated. Aurora, cloud cover, DRAP, weather pressure (mB and inHg), MUF-RT overlays — all rendered on my infrastructure at multiple resolutions on a continuous refresh cycle. OHB proxies the rest from CSI and hopes you don't notice.
Satellite tracking. Fully operational with real-time TLE updates. I've cleaned dead satellites out of the catalog and added new ones — the list is actively curated so your HamClock isn't wasting your time showing you birds that stopped transmitting years ago. OHB can't even get basic satellite tracking working.
Every single data feed independently generated. Dst, Bz/Bt, Kp index, X-ray flux, solar imagery, band conditions — all computed and rendered on my infrastructure. Zero dependency on ClearSkyInstitute. Zero dependency on anyone.
Is everything perfect? No. I have some things to tweak and tune. But the backend is running, it's serving thousands of clocks, and every feed is independently generated. That's more than OHB can say about any of its core functionality.
If Elwood's server went dark tonight, hamclock.com users wouldn't notice. OHB users would lose almost everything.
I'm not the one fragmenting this community. I was the first to get a production backend online — three months ahead of the June deadline. I had 2,700+ clocks served before OHB was functional. I credited OHB's early framework work publicly on hamclock.com.
And let me set the record straight on something: not once has Brian, Udo, or anyone from the OHB team reached out to me. Not an email. Not a DM. Nothing. Any claims otherwise are false. I've communicated briefly with Keith, with Michael, and with dozens of hams who use hamclock.com — many of them my own clients. The OHB camp has never made any attempt at communication. They'd rather talk about me than to me.
Keith and Udo chose to deceive people into trusting an incomplete solution over a working one. They chose to steer this community toward a backend that depends on the very server it claims to replace. That's not preservation — that's gambling with other people's HamClocks so they can protect their product pipeline.
Michael, to his credit, has taken a neutral stance — he'll update host files and let people choose for themselves. More importantly, Michael had the sense to reach out to me directly. We've communicated. He's seen the work. He made his own assessment. That's what a reasonable person does.
Udo? Never reached out. Never asked a single technical question. Never verified a single claim. Just promoted OHB, sold his hardware, and pointed his customers at a backend he never bothered to vet. That tells you everything you need to know about whose interests he's protecting — and it's not yours.
Keith, Udo, and a handful of vocal followers have a platform. They have Facebook groups and comment threads and the confidence that comes from never having to compile a line of code. They speak loudly, and in the absence of competing technical voices, people understandably listen.
But here's what they don't see: my inbox. I have dozens of personal messages from hams — many of them retirees who rely on HamClock every day — expressing gratitude for what I've built. People who quietly switched to hamclock.com, saw that it works, and took the time to say thank you privately. They don't post on Facebook. They don't argue in comment threads. They just use what works and appreciate the person who built it.
Those are the people I'm doing this for. Not the critics with product catalogs.
Udo has been described as having "no stake in any of them." Let's look at what N0LSR Design LLC sells at n0lsr.com:
His website states explicitly: "Inovato and N0LSR Design support and promote the OHB project." He's building OHB into his product firmware. He controls which backend his customers connect to by default. His entire product line depends on being the gatekeeper between you and your backend server.
That's not "no stake." That's a business model.
My work is what keeps their businesses alive. By building a fully independent backend that actually works, I've ensured that HamClock has a future past June. That means Michael, Udo, and everyone else selling HamClock hardware can keep selling it. Without hamclock.com, their products become expensive paperweights the moment CSI goes offline and their proxy stops answering.
You're welcome.
I'm not interested in competing with hardware vendors. I'm interested in making sure every HamClock has a reliable backend to connect to — regardless of who sold it. If vendors want to work with me, my door has always been open.
Point your HamClock at hamclock.com for five minutes. The switchover takes 30 seconds. Compare the feeds. Compare the maps. Compare the uptime.
Judge by what works — not by who has a product catalog.
Who do you want running your backend — people who proxy what they can't build, or someone who engineered every feed from scratch?