[ct-user] CT 9.45 bugs

[Steve Lund]

Having been a late convert from CT 8.53, my first experience with CT
9.45 was in the CQWW DX phone contest last weekend. I ran into several
problems.

1) The Time ON/OFF indicators in the Rate Window are inaccurate. I was
operating in the Single Operator Distracted category and had my first
emergency at 0037Z. At that time the ON/OFF times were 0.0/0.0! I was
interrupted many times, but noticed at 0444Z that the ON/OFF times were
3.0/2.0! The times only incremented in whole hours. The update interval
was 1 hour, but was not at the beginning of the hour. (The QSO rates and
multiplier values seemed to update after every QSO.) Typically, the true
operating time was an hour greater than that indicated by the time ON.
For CQWW DX this is not much of a concern, but for Sweepstakes you can
only work 24 out of 30 hours and CT 9.45 would let you work close to 25
hours! At various times I ran the BIN file through  9to8.exe and
imported the log into CT 8.53. CT 8.53 always calculated the times
correctly. 

2) I had to shut off the auto SAVELOG feature as SAVELOG would randomly
crash and dump out to DOS. I never figured out why this happened. One
sequence that always crashes is to do a WRITELOG followed by SAVELOG.

3) A minor annoyance was the "Domain error in acos" that would pop up in
various windows, but most often on the logging line. F11 would not clear
the line, but paging the line out of the logging window would clear it.
I think this error is partially due to the weird sunrise/sunset times in
the Check Country (F10) window. For some countries the time would be
displayed with extra characters, for example, 06-11/18-32 (even without
the dashes the times were not correct).

4) One feature I really appreciated was the BandMap. For DX contests,
I'm stuck doing S&P, so being able to use Ctrl-Enter to create a list of
stations was great. I would like to propose two enhancements. After
doing a Ctrl-Enter, I always had to press F11 to clear the logging line.
It seems like this should happen automatically. In the SO category, the
entries in the BandMap should have a longer retention period. Normally,
PacketCluster would keep refreshing the BandMap, but, of course, this is
not available in SO category.

73,

Steve K6UM

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