[SD-User] SD in the Yeovil Fun Run

[Dave Sergeant]

This week was the G-QRP sponsored Yeovil Fun Run. I was determined
to use computer logging this year but could see the limitations in SD
for this particular contest (further to my posting a few weeks ago 
about general purpose contest logging programs.

The attempt was successful, and I thought it might be interesting to 
tell you all how I used SD for a contest it was totally undesigned 
for.

There were a number of problems in using SD Type 11 (General Purpose) 
for this contest:

1. The exchange consists of serial number, RST (often not 599, this 
is a QRP contest..), output power and name. The limitation of 12 
characters in free format data is a problem with long names. As it 
happened nobody had a name longer than 6 characters, and by leaving 
out all spaces they all fitted in (eg 2335WGERALD). I had a piece of 
paper handy to jot down any longer names which would come up.

2. The sent serial number is to start at a number of your choosing 
greater than 100. SD of course forces you to start at 001, so I 
decided to start at 201 and stuck a small piece of paper with '2' on 
it over the leading zero on my screen to stop me getting confused.

3. The contest has four sessions on four seperate evenings and you 
can work stations again in each session. SD of course flags these as 
duplicates, but you have to log them anyway. Tab gets me between the 
various fields, but if I needed to go back to change the sent RST for 
instance it cleared all the QSO data when I tabbed through the 
callsign field (found out the hard way in the middle of a QSO!).

4. For output log the .PRT format was used, and this had to edited to 
score the event manually, correct the sent serial numbers to start at 
201, insert the missing spaces in the exchange and generally tidy up. 
The is clearly no template to produce a Cabrillo output, and I guess 
the adjudicator will be doing it all manually anyway. An ADIF file 
was also produced for input to XMLog.

All in all, I was pleased with the results. This however is hardly a 
busy contest, 83 QSOs over four evenings, and plenty of time to sort 
out any mistakes. It was satisfactory to be able to respond instantly 
with the caller's name when this was displayed in the right hand 
summary pane (with the last character cropped off..).

Hope this has been of interest, and will be of use to others who want 
to use Paul's software for some of the lesser contests.

73 Dave G3YMC

dsergeant at iee.org
dsergeant at btinternet.com
http://www.dsergeant.btinternet.co.uk