[Trlog] Contest Country File Mods

[Paul Kirley]

Having raised the issue of the overly large cty.dat file, I decided to try to address the problem.

The file cty.dat is plain-text, and its format is fairly obvious.  My review of the October 15 version indicated that there were two huge country entries, China at 348 lines and Asiatic Russia at 354 lines.  The great majority of the data for those two countries is zone data, rather than country data.

I looked at old versions of cty.dat that I happened to find on my machine, specifically April 5 and October 5 of this year.  I copied their China and Asiatic Russia portions respectively and cut each down to eliminate zone and individual-station data (there wasn't much of the latter).

Then I used a text editor (Wordpad on my Win98SE machine) to paste the brief resulting entries over those in the current October 15 version of cty.dat.  These two changes shrank cty.dat from 110 KB to 60 KB.  When I loaded the modified cty.dat into TRLog, it started and appears to run OK.  Of course, it no longer knows specific data for China and Asiatic Russia zones and/or individual stations, so I will have to keep that in mind when working those two countries.  It thinks that all of China is zone 24, and all of Asiatic Russia is zone 17.

If you want to try this approach, copy the following entries and paste them over the entire respective entries in AD1C's current version of cty.dat and use the result in your TRLog directory.

China:                    24:  44:  AS:   40.00:  -116.40:    -8.0:  BY:
    3H,3I,3J,3K,3L,3M,3N,3O,3P,3Q,3R,3S,3T,3U,B1,B2,B3,B4,B5,B6,B7,B8,B9,BA,
    BD,BG,BH,BI,BL,BT,BY,BZ,XS;

Asiatic Russia:           17:  30:  AS:   67.18:  -104.00:    -7.0:  UA9:
    R0,R8,R9,RA0,RA8,RA9,RB0,RB8,RB9,RC0,RC8,RC9,RD0,RD8,RD9,RE0,RE8,RE9,RF0,
    RF8,RF9,RG0,RG8,RG9,RH0,RH8,RH9,RI0,RI8,RI9,RJ0,RJ8,RJ9,RK0,RK8,RK9,RL0,
    RL8,RL9,RM0,RM8,RM9,RN0,RN8,RN9,RO0,RO8,RO9,RP0,RP8,RP9,RQ0,RQ8,RQ9,RR0,
    RR8,RR9,RS0,RS8,RS9,RT0,RT8,RT9,RU0,RU8,RU9,RV0,RV8,RV9,RW0,RW8,RW9,RX0,
    RX8,RX9,RY0,RY8,RY9,RZ0,RZ8,RZ9,U0,U8,U9,UA0,UA8,UA9,UB0,UB8,UB9,UC0,UC8,
    UC9,UD0,UD8,UD9,UE0,UE8,UE9,UF0,UF8,UF9,UG0,UG8,UG9,UH0,UH8,UH9,UI0,UI8,
    UI9;

When you modify cty.dat, don't leave any blank lines and be certain to replace the entire entry for each country, but nothing else.

Hopefully this will allow us to continue to benefit from AD1C's work, except for China and Asiatic Russia.

If you notice missed prefixes for China or Asiatic Russia, please let me know, as my manual deletions may have been overly aggressive.

73, Paul W8TM