I spent some time this afternoon experimenting with the announce window
colors per N5RP's e-mail. Monitors vary in how they display colors, so I
tried LCDs, CRTs, etc.
For some reason the bright red on cyan (turquoise) combination does
sometimes take on a strange appearance. I found that regular red on cyan
looks a lot better. I surmise that the reason for this is that the cyan
background is relatively bright and so the darker red provides better contrast.
I tried other bright colors and (to my eye at least) none provided much, if
any improvement. Bright blue for example did not exhibit the "glow" people
mentioned with red, but it was starting to blend with the cyan. Regular
blue OTOH looked about as good as regular red.
At this point, I decided to take a step back. The purpose of the different
colors is to provide differentiation in representing the three categories
of stations shown: new mult, new station (but not a new mult), and a
dupe. It would be useful if the colors provided some natural
prioritization - i.e., new mults are most important, then new QSOs, and
finally dupes. (One might argue the merits of showing dupes at all - this
is sometimes beneficial to know where to find a station to get him to move
bands, and in any case dupes can be filtered out via the SPOT FILTER
CONTROL PANEL.)
Bright white is most dominant color, and its used in with a cyan background
in many places in NA with no complaints. A regular color, such as blue is
the next dominant, then finally black. Changing NA so that new mults are
bright white, new non-mult QSOs are blue and dupes are black seems to be an
improvement.
If anybody wants to check this out during the contest, drop me an
e-mail. I'll shoot you just the new NA.EXE file to save time.
This new version also shows beam heading and sun times per W5GZ's note here
on the reflector.
73,
Dave Pruett, K8CC
DATOM Engineering
datom@contesting.com
http://www.datomonline.com
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