[WriteLog] WriteLog Problems with Texas QSO Party

[Richard L. King]

Hi Wayne, Ron, and everyone.

Our team used WriteLog for the Texas QSO Party. We ran into a few 
problems that need to be fixed but nothing catastrophic.

Our setup was as a multi-op mobile in a 2004 Tahoe with three 
operators, stations, and computers. We were running version 10.55D 
and had radios, keying, and the whole works working with the 
software. The three computers were networked together using a 12V DC 
wireless router inside the vehicle.

Here are the problems:

1. When we started operating from the first county (TRAV) everything 
was working OK. When we switched counties the first time (to HAYS) 
some of the operators were slow to change their own county in their 
own computer. So one station (20M) was running like crazy and making 
QSOs from HAYS county but it was still logging as from TRAV (Travis) 
on the other computers.

Does the network send your own county around the network or does it 
just log what is the current county in each separate computer? It 
seems to log only what is in each computer and we ended up with three 
computers with different records of our present county.

This is also a problem when we operate on a county line and give out 
both counties. Some mobiles in the TQP actually operate on 4 county 
corner points and give out four QSOs and four counties to each caller.

2. It is very awkward to change counties on the fly. This was our 
first problem and when we tried to change counties the first time we 
couldn't get rid of our present county in the software. We finally 
figured it out.

But it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere how a mobile station 
can change counties. We looked and looked at the help pages and 
couldn't find anything.

This is how you actually do it. You TAB over to "MY-CNTY" in the 
input area, hit the "Delete" key once, hit TAB again, and (surprise) 
you get a window with a county list. Then you enter the first letter 
of the new county (Only the first letter, can't do more than that or 
it gets lost). Then you hit the "line down" key until the county you 
want is highlighted. Now you can hit enter and the county is finally 
changed to the new county.

As I said, this isn't documented anywhere that I could find.

I would like to see an easier method for mobile stations to change counties.

3. You cannot move the cursor up and do an edit to correct the 
My-CNTY field in the log. It will not accept the county name change 
unless you go back to the complicated "My-CTNY" procedure listed in 
problem # 2 first. Then after making the county change, then you can 
make the county correction but you have to do the entire procedure 
again to get back to your current county again.

4. The Cabrillo file creation isn't allowed in the contest drop down 
tab. How do you make a Cabrillo file? This is a serious problem for 
mobiles to submit their log files.

5. Under the contest drop-down tab I tried to do a save as ARRL 
format thinking that would give me the entire log. I was surprised to 
find that it would only create a file of the QSOs from whatever 
"MY-CNTY" was set to. Since we operated in 47 counties, I would have 
had to create 47 files changing "MY-CNTY" every time. Then I would 
have to concatenate these files together somehow. The "ARRL format" 
feature was obviously only written for fixed stations that don't 
change counties.

6. The only way I could create a full file of our Texas QSO Party log 
was to open the WL file, highlight the entire log entries with a 
"Shift left click" on the first and last QSO, go to the Edit drop 
down, do a "copy", open a notebook file, paste the log there, and 
then use an ASCII editor to fix the file into a reportable log. The 
ability to report the log for a mobile stations needs to be improved 
in WriteLog.

That's all the problems I can remember right now. I hope they are 
viewed as important enough to be addressed before the TQP next year.

73, Richard - K5NA