I used NA for a serious two-radio effort in SS CW and for just fooling
around in CQWW CW. It ran like a train in a full-screen DOS window under
Win98SE.
This was the first time I had run NA full up with my Top Ten SO2R box and
the Rotor-EZ rotator control interface. If the Top Ten box is modified to
correct their LPT port pin-out error (details on the Top Ten Web site), it
functions perfectly and makes two-radio operation a breeze.
The rotor control also works fine and is very handy in DX contests, but I
found a couple of rough spots with this function. By design, if you type a
number into any field and do Ctrl-F10, the rotator is commanded to the
heading entered and the field is cleared. Unfortunately, if you have tabbed
over to one of the exchange fields and then do Ctrl-F10, it rotates to the
value in that field. Way too many times in CQWW I would hit the space bar
to check status of a call and then decide to rotate the antenna. When I did
this, NA would then proceed to rotate the antenna to the heading in the
zone field and delete the entire QSO record! So I would have to manually
re-enter the call and then command the rotation again while the cursor was
in the call field. This wasted lots of time, since the antenna couldn't be
rotated back to the proper heading until it had gone all the way to the
wrong one. If the rotation command was issued with the cursor in the call
field the heading look-up worked great for most calls, but could not
resolve portable calls, e.g. with TG4/W0IZ in the call field, issuing
Ctrl-F10 would do nothing. This is very curious, since the multiplier
determination function had no problem resolving the call.
I would recommend that sometime in the next few releases the code be fixed
to look ONLY in the call field to determine the heading, and wipe only the
CURRENT field containing a number when it does so. Also, the same logic
used to find multiplier status should be used to resolve the heading.
Another (very minor) observation is that the flashing "needed mult" message
at the bottom of the logging window should disappear when the QSO is
logged. In 10.58 and earlier releases, the message persists until there has
been some kind of data entry activity on the next line or it is overwritten
with another status message. Since I didn't use packet, the "needed mult"
message would stay there indefinitely. I eventually got used to
automatically hitting F11 to get rid of it. Also, it's curious that even if
the QSO was a new country multiplier the message was populated with the
zone instead.
Other than these minor problems, NA worked great -- again. Thanks again for
a solid stable program, Dave!
73...
Randy, W8FN
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