Pardon me if this is a repeat, but it did not get reflected back to me, so
I'm unsure if it went thru-----
I finally tracked down a problem that has puzzled me in NA. Last year in
CQWW I imported my logs into DX4WIN after the contest and was puzzled that
I had so many zone exception errors. Sure enough, looking at my NA logs,
the zones were incorrect, and in some instances the country talley was
incorrect. I've been not doing any contesting since because of work and
family commitments, but I'm getting geared up for CQWW CW this year and
started playing around with NA and the radio/packet interface, etc. and I
discovered what was happening:
Say I think I work HB9ANT and find out I actually didn't and he goes QRT
before I can work him. I next work 4X4AR and just type over HB9ANT. NA will
NOT correct the zone and country automatically. The only way you can
correct it is to do it manually or do CTRL-K to kill off the line. This bit
me a number of times. The problem is, even if I change the zone manually I
don't know if it counted the country correctly or not!
Now, if you work a station and hit enter to log and then discover on the
next QSO that you worked somebody different than you thought (happens a lot
when you depend on packet spots with guys real close in frequency) you
cannot arrow back up to that QSO and do CTRL-K, it doesn't work. So, again,
if you manually correct the call and zone, does NA automatically correct
the country? I haven't had time yet to play with that one.
I don't know if older versions of NA did this or not, but certainly it's
there in 10.X. I think CT automatically corrects, but I don't own a current
version so I haven't checked it out. Seems to me that when I multi-oped at
another station in SSB it did work "properly". Maybe that's where I got the
idea that it should do that in NA.
Bottom line - check your logs carefully. I lost points on my submitted log,
and I bet that was the cause of some of the points taken off (the amount of
points I lost don't make any sense at all, but that's another story).
Has anyone else noticed this and, if you have CT does it do it in that
program? NA is a terrific program, and Dave sure has given me many times
over my money's worth. If this is the way the program works, I'll know what
to look out for, but I personally wish it worked automatically. I'm glad I
caught it. No idea how long it has escaped my notice.
73 all, and good luck this year in the contests.
Tom - N4ZJ
Tom Ogburn - Technician at WWBT Television, Richmond, VA
Amateur Radio Callsign N4ZJ (ex WB4BVY, AD4KE)
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