[WriteLog] In Sprint Serial number sometimes went into Call Field

Jim Smith jimsmith at shaw.ca
Sun Mar 14 16:49:42 EST 2004


During the RTTY Sprint I ran into an annoyance that kept costing me 
time.  Here's the scenario.

Someone would call me, I would click his call into the Call field and 
respond with my canned exchange.  So far, so good.

When he sent his exchange sometimes his Serial # would be followed by 
garbage.  e.g. 126dsrx3.  When I clicked on the first digit (the 1) WL 
seemed to think it was a call and replaced the real call with 126dsrx3, 
leaving the Serial # field blank.  This caused a lot of stumbling on my 
part while I fixed it and slowed both the other guy and myself down.

Does anyone know of a way to keep this from happening (other than typing 
in the number when I see it has garbage attached)?

I understand that some calls do start with a number so WL has to decide 
whether it's a replacement for the call in the call field or something else.

Suppose WL did the following in the circumstance described. 

WL, noticing that the Call field has something in it and that the item 
clicked on starts with a number, truncates the item just before the 
first non-numeric character and puts the resulting number in the Serial 
# field.  In the example mentioned it would put 126 in the Serial # 
field and ignore the remaining dsrx3.


The serial # might still be wrong but at least you now have only one 
field to fix instead of 2 or maybe more.

Would this behaviour mess up something else in some other circumstance?  
I can see that it would if you had 9A7B in the Call field and then you 
clicked on 9A7X to correct it.  You'd still have 9A7B in the Call field 
and now you would have 9 in the Serial # field.


If this would be acceptable behaviour for WL I'd sure like to see it in 
an upgrade somewhere down the line.  Maybe with a switch so you could 
select the behaviour you want.

Comments?

73 de Jim Smith   VE7FO





More information about the WriteLog mailing list