Jason,
As far as I know, there is no 15 minute timer in Writelog for Field Day.
That would be a nice feature, though...
I wouldn't recommend changing the band setup, even if you aren't going to
work some of the bands. There's probably a way to make fewer bands display
correctly in the band summary, but I don't know how. Best approach for most
contests is to leave the band setup alone.
You should never use the SEQ number to determine the number of contacts. For
example, if you happen to work a dupe or an out of band contact, that will
increase the SEQ number but not the band totals. The SEQ number is sort of a
raw, unprocessed number. The real number of contacts per band shows up in
the band summary. As for SEQ numbers being the same on more than one
machine, check the Setup menu under "Sort ordering and serial numbers..."
There are several options for how to manage serial numbers with multiple
stations. Your version may have been setup to use separate serial number
tracking on each band. Serial numbers are not sent in Field Day and most
other contests (other than WPX and some others), so this setting isn't
relevant to Field Day.
Well, I would assume that the paddles were not connected to the computer, so
how would Writelog know when the paddles are pressed! Seriously, the problem
is that Writelog does not support paddle input to the computer. NA allows it
through the parallel port, but I was not aware that CT allowed this. That
may be a relatively new feature in CT. At any rate, the only way you can do
this with Writelog is to use the W5XD+ external keyer. Otherwise, use ESC to
terminate messages. This isn't hard to learn and works well.
I don't know what's going on with your summary sheet. Maybe changing the
band setup messed it up.
I wouldn't throw out Writelog just yet. The problems you encountered are all
addressable.
73, Dick WC1M
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Armentrout - N4DSL [mailto:n4dsl@atrs.com]
> Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 5:17 PM
> To: Writelog@contesting.com
> Subject: [WriteLog] Field Day concerns
>
>
> Hi,
> This year our club used Writelog for the first year, with the
> help of me setting up the wireless networking. People were
> skeptical of changing from CT, but for the most part
> everything worked smooth expect for some bugs that our
> operators found.
>
> The first thing we noticed, there is no way to setup 15min
> band changes. I found this very odd. How are you supposed to
> be warned if you make more than one band change in 15min? Not
> everyone can remember that and it would be nice to prevent
> contacts to be logged or at least a red flag to let you know
> that you are in violation of the 15min rule.
>
> I changed the band setup to the bands that we would only be
> operating, but when we did this, in the band summary window,
> it no longer told you what each line represented, with three
> stations networked together, we could not tell which band the
> contacts were made on. Each line just showed numbers but no label.
>
> With our three stations networked, the SEQ number would be
> used multiple times by different stations within the same
> minute. The CW station might make a contact and be contact
> number 150 and then the phone station makes a contact the
> same minute and used the same SEQ number? That doesn't make
> any sense to me. We had no way to tell exactly how many Q's
> were made between the three stations at any given moment.
>
> Another thing that the CW ops didn't have that they were used
> to in CT, was when they were sending a macro from the
> computer, they couldn't interrupt the macro by sending on the
> paddle connected to the radio. Is this possible with
> Writelog? I couldn't give them an answer on that one, I am
> not a cw op, so I didn't know how CT worked in that fashion.
> They would have to press ESC on the computer to interrupt.
> They wanted to interrupt with the paddle.
>
> Another problem, is when I go to export the summary sheet, it
> is showing contacts on 6m and 10m only, not any other bands?
>
> Back to CT next year I guess, although we won't be able to
> network wireless though.
>
> If there is anything I am doing wrong to cause these bugs,
> please let me know.
>
>
>
> -
> Jason Armentrout
> N4DSL
> www.keezletown.com
>
>
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