This version of the HSpot manual and on-line Help has gone through further revisions since the OT1 Call versions. When HSpot reached the Open Time (OT1) Call version (5.0), the extensive updates included detailed post-launch knowledge and updates, particularly in the instrument chapters. Further modifications to observing modes have occurred in the intermediate versions of the 5.* series, some of them extensive and in HSpot 6.0 for the OT2 Call which featured further new, flight-tested, second generation observing modes and extensively updated calibration information, plus a series of fixes, some major, some minor that resolve issues in previous versions of HSpot, particularly related to HIFI, which has had many important and complex changes over the last year.

In the 3.x version of this manual, the information about installation, requirements and supported platforms was completely revised. In the Version 4 there were many changes in the instrument-specific functionality, so the instrument-specific chapters (9-12) were extensively revised by Tony Marston and the Instrument and Calibration Scientist Team to take into account the many new features that were included and the features that have been supressed since the initial Guaranteed Time user release of HSpot. The rest of the manual was revised line-by-line and both the text and the screenshots updated. This reflects both the many tweaks and improvements made at the HSC to fix bugs and increase functionality and the constant updates in the Spot Core made at IPAC. Although HSpot 6.0 was not a major evolution of HSpot with respect to the final GT2 Call version, it included no less than 13 significant and major upgrades with respect to HSpot 5.3.2. Most of these will not be obvious to the majority of users, but several fix important bugs that have been reported, mainly in specialist use of HSpot. Overall, 31 changes have been made to HSpot and Proposal Handling with respect to the final OT1 Phase 2 version (5.2.4).

Most of the changes between HSpot 6.0.1 and the new HSpot 6.1.0 release are "behind the scenes" and have no direct impact on users. However, there are some important changes that affect certain types of observation, in particular HIFI observations in Bands 5b and 6a and PACS observations below 55 microns. In some cases the time estimator now gives significantly different results from the initial OT2 version and many time estimates have changed considerably since the HSpot release version for OT1, or will change significantly if the same sensitivity is required as was obtained with HSpot 6.0.1. As usual, the latest version also contains a series of fixes to small bugs that have been identified in HSpot, including some necessary updates to the Spot Core.

Since the initial v5.0 release continuous updates have been made, as necessary. Most of these are very small and not all have gone into the on-line version of HSpot's Help; some have only been published in the version of the manual in the HSC Web Page.