OK TR aficionados I need some help figuring out what happened to me during the
recent SS SSB contest.
For months I have been looking forward to running TR during SS. I painstakingly
have built my own personal TRMASTER.DTA file with names, checks, sections,
etc. The thought of calling people by name, thanking them for QSO's in past
years, and having some of the exchange pre-filled was appealing. I also had the
DVP memories programmed including the 4 CQ memories that would be selected
from randomly -- that sounded really cool.
At 21:00 I was off and running, well off and S&P'ing. About 21:30 as I reached
my 17th or so QSO TR hung on me. The symptom was first that as I typed in new
characters they would not show on the screen. The blinking cursor would move
across the entry fields, but nothing would show. Then the text in the Name and
Country display area disappeared. Thinking it was RF or something I rebooted.
On the next QSO upon hitting Enter TR totally crashed. Runtime Error 103 and
what I assume is a memory address (2799:731B) was displayed on the top of the
screen behind the standard display. Even after rebooting a few times and even
trying Version 6.15 instead of 6.16, I just could not make it work. So I
ended up
taking the log, printing it out, typing it into CT and finishing the rest of
the
contest with CT.
Determined to figure out what happened I sat down the last couple of nights
to re-
create the crime. Sometimes I can make it happen after just 2 or 3 Q's
sometimes
after 30 it does not happen. Intermittent problems are the worst. Here is my
thinking, what do you think?
Though Runtime Error 103 is not listed in the TR manual I am guessing that
it is a
memory error of some sorts. Here are some particulars of the memory in my
system:
* After booting the PC and at the DOS prompt I have 548K of the lower 640K
available.
* After loading DVPTSR there is 497K available.
* After loading TR there is 51,384 showing in the display, though I have also
seen 54,328. This seems low. And during the load process, right after the
registration screen I can see something flashed up on the screen that says
"Shared
memory" and what I assume is another memory address. It is not on the screen
long
enough to read it all.
* After putting one QSO in the log TR shows 36,328 in the memory display
though I
have also seen 14,696.
I am running a DOS 6.00 system with DOS loaded into HIMEM, and with
SMARTDRV and DOUBLESPACE loaded.
Any ideas out there? Is my base memory going bad? If so why does CT run fine?
Are the drivers interacting with TR?
Thanks,
Scott/K7ZO
k7zo@micron.net
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