Other than a few bug fixes (you will have seen this in "What's new" dialog), a major piece of functionality this version brings is the ability to offer the user to select only nodes that have been confirmed active. This was driven by feedback received from several users who randomly picked nodes from the list only to turn up whatever they choose isn't working. The users were finding this very frustrating - if a node is listed in NKCCluster it is reasonable to assume it can actually be used.

The way NKCCluster worked prior to this release is on first startup it would download a list from http://www.dxcluster.info/telnet/index.php and from then on use it whenever node selection was required. As nodes tend to go online and offline quite frequently and at short notice (in testing thus far it has been noticed at any point in time roughly about 50% of the nodes listed on this web sites can't be connected to!) before long a user would end up with quite a few nodes they wouldn't be able to connect to. A simple attempt to address this was writing a tool that downloads the node list, periodically tries to connect to each node in turn and reports the outcome. The Web interface for this tool (with a simple search capability) is on https://www.chonky.net/nkccluster/find-working-node.

This concept has in release 2.2.0 been expanded to NKCCluster itself. It now connects to the above node status service and downloads the node list whenever node selection is required. To avoid doing this on every single node change, these results are cached for up to a day (therefore at most once a day a user will download the full list of nodes). While this also can't be 100% accurate, it is still way more accurate than prior to this version. Connection results (successful or failed connection to a node) are also automatically reported to the Find Working Node tool for improved accuracy.

Next time you change a node you're connected to, expect the list to be downloaded (you'll see the "Populating cluster nodes list" progress bar). This should happen at most once a day and it would be reasonable to assume you'll be able to connect to most nodes on the list.

Option to select only confirmed good nodes (enabled by default)	HamLog frequencies in MHz