Something I'm about to start doing... A Transmission timer.
It's an Amateur Radio thing. Most Ham Repeaters have session timeouts, my local one limits overs to 3 minutes (..which is a bit small compared to others), and this just counts up in seconds whenever that super-simple RF signal-level circuit outputs a voltage, which happens when there's a local non-microwave radio transmission, i.e: me on the FT-817.
Coding will be in MSP430 assembler.
The '430 is kewl-- it's a proper Von Neumann CPU, and the instruction set makes this old Commodore 64 coder quite erect.
Given how much power those fcukhueg 7-segs will use, I'm not even going to bother with low-power mode on the CPU.