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[NA-User] NA 10.56 Also Busted for CQ-M

To: <na-user@contesting.com>
Subject: [NA-User] NA 10.56 Also Busted for CQ-M
From: k8cc@comcast.net (David A. Pruett)
Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 20:00:07 -0400
Bob,

Try creating a new CQ-M file and I suspect you'll find its not busted at all.

The reason for this, and the ARCI problem you reported earlier has to do 
with changes necessary for the New England QSO Party.  The preferred NEQP 
implementation called for five digit location abbreviations (in this case, 
a concatenation of a three digit county abbreviation and the two digit 
state).  The .QDF file format has, since its creation in 1992, only 
provided for a four digit location abbreviation.  For example, this is why 
NA has been limited to four digit abbreviations in IARU.  To support 
contest formats such as IOTA and ARCI (once the possible member #s exceeded 
four digits) which needed five digits we had to do a kludge, essentially 
"stealing" a digit from what would be the second digit of the check in an 
ARRL SS log.

When working on NEQP, I struggled with how to cope with the five digit 
location field.  I did not want to have to code yet another kludge (since 
ARCI and IOTA use different field formats) so I decided to fix things a 
different way by taking advantage of two unused characters in the QSO 
record which have lain dormant since 1992.

The good news of this decision is that now for certain field formats, the 
location field can now be up to six digits long, and can be configured in 
the template editor.  Besides NEQP, we've taken advantage of this in IARU 
so that the HQ abbreviations can now be up to six digits long.

The down side of this decision is that for the ARCI and IOTA contests the 
field has "moved" one digit.  New ARCI and IOTA logs created on 10.56 and 
later will re-load correctly, however old ARCI and IOTA logs will not, as 
you have discovered.

Contests which had four digit location fields are absolutely unaffected by 
this change.  To support the old ARCI and IOTA logs with five digit fields 
in the old format, we've created a small utility program called 
FIELDFIX.EXE which we'll add to the NA download ZIP file.  Run this program 
once on your old logs and the problem will be fixed.

Some time this weekend we'll have a new ZIP1056.EXE archive put up on the 
DATOM web site.

I regret any inconvenience this has caused.  I spent a lot of time prior to 
NEQP working on a solution to this - and even coded NA two different ways 
trying different solutions - the main reason that NEQP support came out so 
late.  In the long run, this is the best solution which allows some 
expandability in the future.

73,

Dave/K8CC


At 01:57 AM 5/9/02 -0400, Bob Patten wrote:
>This weekend is the CQ-M.  I've used an edited Country.Dat file for the
>past three years to include the Russian regions and islands that also
>count as mults.  This has worked with all versions of NA up to and
>including 10.54.
>
>But v10.56 crashes with message: Error 14 occurred in module 10.56 at
>address 0BF3:04D1
>
>I'll use v10.54 this weekend..
>
>Maybe add this and the ARCI problem to the "to-do" list?
>
>--
>73,     Bob Patten, N4BP                Plantation, FL
>
>E-Mail: n4bp@netzero.net                Website: http://www.qsl.net/n4bp
>QRP ARCI #3412    SOC #1    ARS #799    Whiners #6   FISTS #7871
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