[UK-CONTEST] IOTA - to run or not to run

[Don Beattie]

I noted with interest Chris 'WOJ's, comments about software. Chris, you're
right, of course, that it's been difficult to get any software that  really
addresses the IOTA Contest adequately for a multi-op station. SD is fine for
single op, but when it comes to two PCs --- UGH !

In the early days of the IOTA test I tried "one PC SD" which was
impossible - leaning over the other op to add mult Q's. CT seemed to offer a
solution, but in fact it has no facilities to check the need for an island
mult. I looked at Writelog for this year, but too late in the day. It needs
Ethernet, and I don't yet have that at home, so would have needed to get
network cards etc etc. So I went for NA (10.57). I ran it under true DOS on
both machines (NOT DOS inside Windows) A few comments about v 10.57

Overall it worked fine. The network stayed up all the contest, except when
an operator hit F10 by mistake. On one PC, this caused a fatal crash, which
needed a full re-boot. The Cluster link stayed up all weekend via 144 MHz.
There are a few gripes about the way the windows work in NA (like you can't
have the band map running in background - every time you do something else,
it disappears). And of course the perennial problem of giving consecutive
serial numbers - we found it necessary to "grab" serial numbers by entering
001 or something in the received number as soon as we got a response, and
then going back and editing the received number. Otherwise, there was a real
risk that the mult station would use that serial number after you had given
it, and before you could finish and log the QSO ! Messy. I don't know how
Writelog addresses this problem. Of course with contests using Zones as the
exchange, this is a non-problem. It would be nice if a Serial number could
be "booked" or earmarked through a function key, when one station is about
to use it.

The real problem with NA I found (and all these problems may be my
inexperience with NA here) was the utility available to clean up the log at
the end. The idea is to turn the main .QDF file into a . SDF file to clean
it up, and then back to a .QDF file. In theory it works fine, BUT it fails
to accept five digit island codes, and truncates the last digit. The same
thing happens if you try to make a .RES file (CT look-alike).

There is also a utility to delete specific calls from the log - rather like
the fix-mine in CT. I put G3BJ into ten busted Qs, and tried to run the
utility, only to find it shifted all the serial numbers, renumbering all
QSOs after the first deleted Q !

So I ended up making a .PRN file, editing that to remove all the page breaks
and other stuff, and ending up with a clean text file of the log. Of course
it's easy to remove the busted QSOs from that file.

So NA needs careful use (unless I've missed something) but during the
contest, was the best so far, I've found in terms of logging for IOTA.

73

Don, G3BJ