When Elwood became a Silent Key, every HamClock in the world got an expiration date. The lesson was clear: no service should depend on one person with no succession plan.
I wasn't going to make that same mistake.
I'm happy to share that Philip Gladstone, the creator and operator of PSKReporter.info, has agreed to serve as trustee for hamclock.com. Philip will have access to the domain, DNS, and backend infrastructure needed to ensure uninterrupted service for every HamClock pointed at hamclock.com. We're in the process of setting that up now — Philip agreed yesterday and provisioning access is being completed shortly.
For anyone in amateur radio, Philip needs no introduction — but he deserves one anyway.
PSKReporter is one of the most essential tools in ham radio. It ingests millions of real-time reception reports every day from digital mode operators around the world, providing a live, global picture of propagation as it's actually happening. If you've ever checked whether a band is open, looked at where your FT8 signal is being heard, or watched a DXpedition light up the map in real time — you've used PSKReporter.
It has become so fundamental to how we operate that most hams can't imagine the hobby without it. PSKReporter is to digital modes what DX clusters are to CW and SSB — except it's automated, global, and handles a volume of data that would be unthinkable to process manually. Every WSJT-X, JTDX, and GridTracker user on the planet feeds into it. Contest organizers rely on it. DXpedition teams monitor it in real time to see where they're being heard. Propagation researchers use it as a primary data source.
Philip built it. He runs it. He's kept it available and reliable for years — serving the global amateur radio community at a scale very few infrastructure operators ever have to deal with.
That's the kind of person you want holding the keys to critical infrastructure.
This has been a priority for me since I stood up the server. The backend, the feeds, the documentation — none of it matters if the whole thing is one bad day away from going dark.
This isn't just a handshake. Philip has agreed to take on this role and we're provisioning access to the domain, DNS, and infrastructure now. Once complete, he'll have everything he needs to step in and keep the lights on.
hamclock.com has a future beyond me. That's how it should be.