[TRLog] points/km

[Andy Cook, G4PIQ]

Apologies if you've seen this before - I haven't seen this come back on the 
archive.

The RSGB convention of scoring 3 km for a contact with your own square was 
simply an arbitary choice on our part - not a bad one as a square in the UK 
is around 7km from corner to corner - but still arbitary. We'd be very 
pleased to see more of the logging packages implement this of course!

Some time back Tree asked if TR was now scoring 1 pt/km contests correctly 
and I went away to do some digging, but haven't got round to replying with 
what I found. Our VHF Manager, G4OUT tells me that a resolution was passed 
at the IARU Region 1 Conference in April 1987 which stated that "when 
calculating distances for vhf/uhf/microwave IARU contests a conversion 
factor of 111.2km/degree should be used." This is equivalent to saying that 
the radius of the earth should be taken as 6,371.291km. This is the 
standard within IARU Region 1.

There are a bunch of logging packages commonly in use in the UK which all 
produce consistent distances and which the authors tell me have very 
carefully implemented this algorithm. As an example these deliver the 
distance between JO01MU and LO01MU or HO01MU as 2712 km, and to JM01MU or 
JQ01MU as 2224km. TR delivers 2721 km to LO & HO, and 2221 km and 2229 km 
to JM and JQ. Any chance of updating to support this standard Tree. I 
understand that there was a detailed explanation of the standard give in a 
Rad Com back in 1987 which I can try and dig out if it will help.

Also, I'd like to plea for support for entering a sent signal report other 
than the default. Could it be done by something like entering S57 in the 
exchange field. I know this may look like a real picky request to those of 
you who don't operate VHF in Europe, but the 59 standard report is not so 
common place here and is actually resented by a significant proportion of 
the QSO base. It's the only thing that's stopping me from moving to TR as 
my logger at VHF right now and the software does so many other oddball 
things!

73,

Andy, G4PIQ


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