[Trlog] Why Not Cabrillo Format?

[Tree]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 02:56:02PM -0600, Dale L Martin wrote:

> Just curious....but why don't we just use Cabrillo Format for logging during
> the contests which require it?
> 
> Why go through the conversion process and end up with two versions of the
> same log (.dat and .cbr)?

A good question.  

First - there is the obvious timing issue...  .DAT was first and .CBR came later.

Rewriting TR to deal with .CBR instead of .DAT would be a lot of work.  

And then, there are those contests that TR support that don't have an official 
Cabrillo format.  We could probably guess at what it would be, but open ourselves
up for thrash is it gets adopted at some point in the future.

One of the things I have tried to do with TR is not change the format of the QSO
entries up to and including the callsign of the station worked.  This allows logs
to be combined into archives for the QSLing purposes.  Adopting the Cabrillo 
format would violate that "rule".  

One of the other limitations I imposed on myself was to stick with QSO lines that
were under 80 characters.  Some of the contests that TR supports would go over 80
characters if I added any additional information (like QSO frequency).  This might
be a limitation that doesn't make sense anymore - so perhaps the time is close to
where we should seriously consider a format change that may, or may not, look 
like Cabrillo.

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