DXLab – Thetis Bridge
The missing link between DXLab Suite and Thetis SDR — DX cluster spots painted live on your panadapter, colour-coded by need-status, with country, beam heading and QSL information in every tooltip.
The problem it solves
If you run an ANAN or ExpertSDR transceiver alongside DXLab Suite, you already have the best spotting and logging tools available — but until now, the spots that SpotCollector carefully colours by need-status never appeared on the Thetis panadapter.
DXLab – Thetis Bridge closes that gap. Every spot that appears in SpotCollector is painted on the Thetis waterfall in real time — same colours, same need-status logic, enriched with country name, beam heading, and QSL membership data.
Who it is for
- Operators running Thetis SDR with ANAN or ExpertSDR hardware
- Operators using DXLab Suite — Commander, SpotCollector, DXView
- DX chasers who want live spot visualisation on the panadapter
- Contest operators who need instant band awareness from the cluster
- SO2R operators running two Thetis instances simultaneously
How it works
SpotCollector receives spots from the DX cluster and resolves each callsign against your DXKeeper log — the spot colour tells you whether the station is needed, worked, confirmed, or a new multiplier. Commander’s Waterfall Bandmap sends those colour-coded spots over UDP to Bridge, which translates them into TCI commands and forwards them to Thetis via WebSocket.
The result: spots appear on the Thetis panadapter within milliseconds, colour-coded identically to SpotCollector, with country, continent, beam heading, distance and QSL membership visible in the tooltip when you hover over any spot.
Clicking a spot on the Thetis panadapter tunes Commander’s VFO to that frequency via the native Commander ↔ Thetis CAT link — Bridge does not intercept radio control.
Quick navigation
Zero configuration
All data sources are discovered automatically from the Windows registry — no paths to configure, no manual setup of file locations.
- DXView database — found automatically
- BigCTY country data — loaded from DXView install
- SpotCollector colours — read from registry
- Commander UDP port — standard 13063
- Thetis TCI port — standard 50001
Start Bridge after DXLab Suite and Thetis are running — spots appear on the panadapter within seconds.
Current status
v7.1.0 — April 2026 — Public release via UDP spot path. Endorsed and listed by DXLab Suite. Active use by operators worldwide running ANAN and ExpertSDR hardware with DXLab.
Stage 2 — pending — Dave Bernstein AA6YQ has committed to adding native Thetis spot commands to Commander following Stage 1 demonstration. When Stage 2 ships, Bridge will accept spots natively without the current Flex handshake scaffolding.
Open source — Released under the MIT licence. Development history and protocol documentation preserved in the project journey pages linked above.