[CQ-Contest] Remote operation

[Hank Greeb]

Lessee, For Field Day 1985 and subsequent years, I wrote a macro using 
Lotus 123 with my brand new HP-110 computer (512 KB memory 4.x MHz CPU) 
all in memory - no hard drive, no floppy disk.   Lotus 123 was a plug in 
on e-PROM or ROM.  It came with the computer.

The macro checked for dupes, and saved all the data to a file.  It sped 
up my operation considerably because I didn't have to manually check for 
dupes, though there was a noticeable lag between entering a call and 
"dupe" showing up on the screen.

I've never been much of a contester, but managed to be within 50 Q's of 
the winner of the Class 1B-1op (battery) classification.  The number of 
Q's I managed was 369, so I never taxed the system.

Would my program have run 1000 Q's?  How much would it have slowed 
down?  How applicable would it have been in a contest where dupes were 
counted differently?  I dunno, but it sure helped with Field Day.

Of course, in those daze, we printed out the dupe sheet and log, and 
sent in paper.  HQ wasn't prepared for computer readable logs in those daze.

Previously (don't remember the date) a bunch of us used a time shared 
main frame computer (TSO it was called), wrote a program in Fortran IV, 
and had it check our paper logs for dupes.

73 de n8xx Hg

On 2/27/2011 3:00 PM, Mats Strandberg <sm6lrr at gmail.com> wrote:
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:00:30 +0300
> From: Mats Strandberg <sm6lrr at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Remote operation
> To: kzerohb at gmail.com
> Cc: CQ-Contest <CQ-Contest at contesting.com>, Paul O'Kane
> <pokane at ei5di.com>
>
> <snip>
> During the mid 80's we started experimenting with computerized 
> DUPE-checking and a bit later also logging, using the technique of 
> that time, a Macintosh computer with a small monochrome screen. Once 
> we had reached 1000 QSOs or more, the software started lagging and we 
> had to wait several seconds between the logging of QSOs. You could not 
> even call this software an online logging program because we logged 
> everything first on normal log sheets manually, and the other operator 
> typed the sheets into the computer. I could at that time accept this 
> type of software easily as it hardly made our station more competitive 
> than stations who did not use this early and primitive logging 
> technique. It only made the score calculation, DUPE-checking and 
> QSL-typing work easier.
> <snip>