[WriteLog] Anoyance during ARRL DX contest

[Ian White, G3SEK]

Steve Baron - KB3MM wrote:
>That's just one of the new 'improvements' that we loyal product supports
>must suffer thru.
>
>IMHO,  not done in a very nice way.
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Stan Staten" <n3hs at qsl.net>
>To: "Writelog" <writelog at contesting.com>
>Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 00:28
>Subject: [WriteLog] Anoyance during ARRL DX contest
>
>
>> Don't know what I was doing wrong, but when I clicked on a spot to work
>> a station and I found that they had drifted or moved a bit, when I tuned
>> to get more understandable audio, Writelog cleared the entry window.
>> This was repeatable and I had to re-enter a number of entries this
>> weekend.
>>

Poor old Wayne - the smoother he makes the WriteLog automation, the more 
we notice any slightly rough spots!

The "disappearing callsigns" are controled by the setting of 
AutoClearOnTuneMinHz= in wl.ini.. The default is 200 (Hz), which can be 
tight even for  CW and RTTY and is definitely too small for SSB. Also 
the frequency of a cluster spot includes the calibration difference 
between the spotter's rig and your own, so cluster spots need even more 
"slack" than spots you've entered yourself... but it's easy enough to 
change if you know it's there.

The reverse of callsigns disappearing from the entry window is that they 
will appear automatically if you tune over a not-yet-worked call on the 
bandmap. I prefer not to have this happen, so have changed 
AutoFillFromBandmapHz from the default of 400 to 0 (off). Again, this is 
easy if you know it's there.

The information *is* there, in the release notes and in the 10.45 
manual. The downloadable PDF manual is highly recommended because you 
can search for keywords (like "clear" and "fill" in the two cases 
above).

On the other hand, it does seem a good suggestion that the default 
setting for most new features in wl.ini should be "off", to avoid any 
disconcerting surprises during a contest.

A really good way to avoid such surprises is to use WL's "General DXCC 
Logger" for your regular Monday-through-Friday logging. You're training 
only *one* set of operating reflexes - which is always a good idea - and 
it gives you plenty of time to find and fix those small config problems. 
It has helped me a lot, and it might help you too.


A final thought about those tuning- and bandmap-related ini settings... 
many of them will depend on what mode you're using, and the optimum 
values will generally be larger for SSB than for all the other contest 
modes. Since WL already knows which mode you're currently using, in some 
later release it would be nice if the relevant settings came in pairs, 
e.g. "AutoClearOnTuneMinHz=300,1000", so that the program could 
automatically select the right one.



-- 
73 from Ian G3SEK