Possible items for the list of things to do (I'm using WL under W2K):
1. Several times during the contest, I noticed that the "Time On" and "Time
Off" figures in the Rates window were not being updated. Sometimes the
numbers would change, but often they were way off. On several occasions the
off time would be zero, where it had previously displayed as several hours
(correctly). By chance, I happened to write a Cabrillo file in the middle of
the contest and that forced the times to be recalculated and displayed
correctly. After that, the times updated correctly for a while. But then I
would notice that the times were off again, and would fix them by writing a
Cabrillo file. I never figured out what put WL into non-update mode. I can
think of three possibilities: 1) it happened when I lost the network
connection to the log backup machine (see item #2 below), 2) it happened
when WL lost communication with one of my rigs that was on a flaky USB
Serial port (see item #3 below), 3) it happened when I exited WL, 4) it
happened randomly. Seems to me that the times should update continuously, or
at least after every QSO. Correct times are important for a contest like SS,
so this should be fixed.
2. I periodically lost the network connection to a copy of WL on another
machine I use for log backup. The network connection between the machines
was fine, it was just the two copies of WL that couldn't communicate
anymore. It didn't help to exit and restart WL on both machines. I noticed
that the little message about "starting network DDE" doesn't appear when you
try to reconnect in this case. The only way to get the two copies of WL
talking again is to reboot the machines. When I do that, the "starting
network DDE" message appears when the connection is initiated and the two
programs connect successfully. It seems to me that some process (the "DDE"
process?) is dying or hanging and needs to be restarted. Isn't there some
way WL could be forced to kill any previous instance of that program and
restart it? Rebooting can take a long time.
3. That bad USB/Serial port really killed me in this contest. I kept getting
"No Rig!" messages and would have to go into the Ports menu and hit OK to
clear it (I guess that reinitialized the ports.) After the contest I
switched WL to a physical COM port. It's not WL's fault that the USB port
was having problems, but WL got me into all sorts of trouble when it
happened. The first time I lost contact with the rig, some QSOs got logged
with the B (out of band) flag. Evidently, WL had garbage in its frequency
register, but a valid frequency was displayed in each flagged record. Very
confusing. It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of those B flags
(by manually editing the frequency to a valid value.) Late in the contest,
something worse happened: I got the "No Rig!" message, didn't notice it for
a while (I was very tired), changed bands, and got a bunch of contacts
logged with the previous band's frequency. Luckily, I noticed that my log
showed I had been working only W6 and W7 on 10M, then suddenly was working a
lot of W8, W4 and W2! I think I corrected the right QSOs, but I'm not sure.
In my opinion, when WL is displaying "No Rig!" it should not log QSOs for
that radio. It should require the user to fix the problem that caused the
condition -- that's a lot better than logging an incorrect or invalid
frequency without warning. I can't think of any reason why the contact
should be logged when "No Rig!" is showing. If the user wants to get around
it, he/she can fix the communication problem or set manual frequency entry
on that rig.
73, Dick WC1M
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