[VHFcontesting] Cabrillo

[kb8u vhf]

Sorry, I lost track of who wrote this:
>The ARRL log submission robot is not the only "customer" of Cabrillo
>format
>data.  As someone who has written software that reads in Cabrillo logs
>myself,
>I can tell you it's madness to have to anticipate and provide for seven
>or
>eight different ways to designate six meters, nine or ten different
>ways to
>designate two meters, three different ways to designate 902 MHz, etc.

If you make a change, you should make it backwards compatible with what you 
used to support.  The old protocol has very minor changes from the new so 
this is not too much to ask.

>
>The A,B,C,D,9,E, etc. band encoding is not widely used outside of North
>
>America and skips over the relatively new 70 MHz band some Region I

I could find no reference to the 70MHz band in the Cabrillo specs at
http://www.kkn.net/~trey/cabrillo/qso-template.html  so they skipped over it 
there, too.

>countries
>now have.  Cabrillo is not intended to be a strictly ARRL or North
>American
>file standard.  The use of numerical frequency designations is also
>consistent with the band designations on HF.
>

It's not very consistent:  28303 is legal.  50125 is not.  1.2 is legal. 
1296100 is not.  1.3 is not.  50 means 50MHz but 47 means 47GHz.

I would rather have not known this, but I had to find the spec. to look up 
what I'm supposed to use instead of letters.  It wasn't easy to find.

I don't understand why support for the letter designators was dropped from 
the log parser, especially since it used to work.  Either it's an oversight 
or the coder chose a completely different computer language and couldn't 
reuse the old code (and is too lazy to write a few extra lines).  Maybe 
'lazy' is too harsh and they just thought it wasn't necessary.  Well, there 
is apparently quite a few people submitting old-style logs (myself included) 
and I don't appreciate unannounced changes that sending me hunting for 
obscure specifications.  They obviously didn't test the changes against last 
years' logs, or decided to force the lusers to change without noticifcation. 
  Thanks.

Russ  KB8U