[VHFcontesting] The "new and improved?" ARRL Log Robot

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 10:45:38PM -0500, John Kalenowsky K9JK wrote:
> 
> At least the report is a little bit more 'informative' but such a 
> 'significant' change SHOULD have been 'tested' and debugged before releasing 
> it on the ARRL's (VHF) Contest "Customers". Was there an announcement 
> somewhere that the "robot" was changing? If there was, >>I<< definitely 
> missed it.

Actually, the change from Cabrillo 2.0 to Cabrillo 3.0 was at least mentioned 
on this reflector back in January:

http://lists.contesting.com/archives//html/VHFcontesting/2007-01/msg00066.html
http://lists.contesting.com/archives//html/VHFcontesting/2007-01/msg00076.html

I agree that it falls short of a clear announcement to the contesting world
at large, but I believe that the League has traditionally worked more with the 
logging software authors on these issues.

There's more to the switch than just arbitrarily changing "1.2" to "1.2G".
The original Cabrillo spec merely indicated what columns in the file would
contain the band information, and did not specify what the band designators
would be.  So, for example, the robot would get logs with any of the following 
to designate a QSO on the 1296 MHz band:

1.2
1.2G
1200
1294
1296
e

The lower bands could be even worse, as you might get logs that include the 
exact frequency, for example:

144
145
146
147
144200
144.200
146550
146.550
b

As the spec was lenient in regards to the band designators, the log robots 
had to be as well, and for the past 5-6 years basically any band designation
you could think of was accepted.  But this of course is a major pain for
the log checkers or anyone creating summary tables from the log data.

-- 
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker at kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/