On Thursday, January 29, 2026 the simple notice (at left) appeared on the HamClock home page.
I’ve worked with Elwood Downey, WB0OEW very closely on HamClock over the last couple of years and we’d become good friends. I emailed him straight away using a different address to the one he posts online and I received an instant reply to say that Elwood has passed away.
What will happen?I’m assuming that some time in June, the backend server that hosts HamClock will go offline. Because so much of the data that is displayed on HamClock comes from its own server, most things will stop working very quickly.Firstly, Live Spots and the On The Air pane will go to zero. The solar data displays will gradually clear and show an error. Within ten minutes or so, the map display will fail as it won’t be able to download. Even the basic country map will fail and a blue bar will appear across the display saying it can’t download.The contest and dxpedition panes will stop getting updates. They may last a little longer.The DXCluster pane is one of the few that relies on a different source for its feed. This will continue to work, but without a map to show the spots on, it’ll be basically useless.I’m going to miss my friend Elwood. Towards the end of last year, he moved house so all his development kit was packed away but up until then, we used to email regularly. Mainly talking about HamClock and what else we could do with it, but often about other stuff, including other projects he was working on. I had nothing to do with the actual programming of HamClock but Elwood would take on board suggestions I and others made, and then between us, we’d thrash it out via beta versions of HamClock, tweaking and adjusting to give the best possible user experience. He’d add something, I’d suggest how to make it work better and between us, I think we ended up with a superb piece of software.I’ll miss the ability to walk into the shack, switch the screen on and at a single glance, see how the bands are performing in real time, noticing any new band/mode slots that are currently on air and seeing any DXPeditions that are live. Being able to have easy access to VOACAP specific predictions or general propagation prediction maps during contests. The whole thing has become an essential tool and there’s nothing that even comes close to replace it with.Over the next few days, I’ll be removing the HamClock content from this site, there’s no need for build instructions any more and there won’t be any need for the other guides when it all goes off in June.Goodbye Elwood.
Tom Salzer, KJ7T writes further in The Random Wire:
HamClock availability and alternatives
As I write this, I see that the HamClock bundle is still shown for sale on the N0LSR store. This is, of course, the hardware layer. It’s worth watching that space.
Meanwhile, you might be interested in evaluating the Gray Line HamClock available through the Gray Line HamClock Users Group on Facebook. This has a 21-day free trial before payment is required. For those interested in a possible alternative to the HamClock software package, you may wish to follow this interesting GitHub project: https://github.com/Aaediwen/AaediHAM. Simon’s World Map is also a contender for a HamClock that runs on Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11: https://www.sdr-radio.com/world-map.
You might also want to take a look at Ham Dashboard. The demo site is at https://va3hdl.github.io/hamdash/
I’m sure there are many other projects underway or soon to be starting to find a solid replace for HamClock. Of course, there is always the venerable Geochron!
Elwood Downey will be missed
The followed was pulled from multiple sources. I hope it is accurate. I have not found an obituary yet. Even where it may not be accurate, it is clear that Downey was a remarkable contributor to engineering, science, and amateur radio.
Elwood Downey WB0OEW is remembered for his generous contributions to open-source scientific software. He was a distinguished engineering alumnus of Purdue University.
HamClock was created via his ClearSky Institute, becoming a staple for amateur radio operators around the world.
Downey developed XEphem, a legendary ephemeris and planetarium program for Unix-like systems, which also served as the foundation for the PyEphem Python library.
He specialized in telescope control systems and astronomical instrumentation, working with various major observatories and the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory.
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