[ct-user] Announcing End of Support for CT8 and Earlier Country Files

[Jim Reisert AD1C]

Hi Folks,

I am planning to stop producing the .CTY files used by CT8 and earlier:

	ARRL.CTY
	CQWW.CTY
	IARU.CTY

I will not delete the old ones, I just will not produce any new ones.

CT9 has been available since 1994.  I think 12 years is long enough 
to support this program.  I can't imagine anyone still uses a  8086 
or 80286-based PC for contesting.  Furthermore, there have been so 
many rule changes that CT8 and earlier is pretty much obsolete.

AR-Cluster uses ARRL.CTY, I have already been in touch with Terry, 
AB5K about using a more modern format (like CTY.DAT).

Unless someone can give me a GOOD reason to keep generating these 
files, CTY-1605 is probably the last version which will include them.

I do plan to continue support for both CT9 and CT10.  In fact, I will 
be generating a new format file for CT10 that treats prefixes and 
callsigns differently.  CT10, Writelog and (I believe) TRlog already 
support this new convention.  Since it's not backward compatible with 
CT9, I will continue to create a compatible version of CTY.DAT in the 
older format.

The reason I'm doing this is that I'm trying to standardize on a 
single master database of entities, prefixes and calls that can be 
used to generate files for contesting, logging, and DX 
clusters.  Currently I have three sources of data and three different 
generator programs.  It's too much work to maintain all this.  Since 
I'll have to write the generators again, I'd rather not have to write 
variation for old versions of CT.

Thanks & 73 - Jim AD1C

-- 
Jim Reisert AD1C, 7 Charlemont Court, North Chelmsford, MA 01863
USA +978-251-9933, <jjreisert at alum.mit.edu>, http://www.ad1c.us