[CQ-Contest] Who copies things any more?

Franki ON5ZO on5zo at telenet.be
Sun Apr 10 16:05:36 EDT 2016


 >human creativity in making errors and funny things while operating and logging
 >is much bigger than the capability of software to deal with without human guide ;-)
 >73 Chris DL8MBS
 >(WAG Contestmanager)

Agreed, but what comes next is even more out of this world. People seem to mess up their Cabrillo log in 101 ways.
There are many liberal interpretations around for the Cabrillo specs, especially with obscure loggers.
Or the log says 'generated by some respectable brand of logger' yet the participant decided to unleash Notepad on the file.

What to think of QSOs made on February 31st? I kidz you not! How does this end up in a PC generated log without grey matter post-processing?

And there is this OK1 station that always (year after year) enters All Band then submits SBxx, and removes ALL contacts that are not on band XX. Many people end up with a NIL, so I 
have code in place to handle this situation.

Even CAT is not ubiquitous well into the 21st century so try to catch QSO that are logged on different bands. Who's got it right, who logged on the wrong band?

Other fun stuff: paste Cabrillo in Word doc and then send that in, or submit a PDF, or a scan of a handwritten log, and a new trend from 2016 on: submit mail without attachment but 
with a link to a cloud storage service à la DropBox. Hard to strip an attachment that isn't there, while it was probably on the submitter's screen as he hit 'send'.

99% of my log checking and programming time is spent on handling 1% weird exceptions. And people keep on fooling us with new tricks.
OTOH I have learned a lot from people's logging mistakes and goofballing.

Franki ON5ZO
Log checker for the UBA DX contests since 2009


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