[WriteLog] ARRL SS SSB - adi prefill file

[Gary AL9A]

I had a few moments of time combined with a bit of curiosity and have succeeded in producing a multi-year history adi prefill exchange file for the upcoming SS SSB contest.  Many thanks to Hal N4GG for stimulating my thoughts in this direction.  The data sources are the ARRL downloadable csv history files of the SS SSB contests for the years 2009 – 2012. 

By appending these four years of history together and then eliminating the dupes the end file contains 4,101 unique call signs.  There is a problem with the data sources for the 2009 and 2010 years as both of these files lack the Check data.  The field for Check is there, but it contains no data in these years, whereas both the 2011 and 2012 files do contain the Check data.  So if you get a prefill hit on a call and the CK field is empty the source file was from either 2009 or 2010.  Bear in mind that these source files only contain information for stations that have submitted a SS log to ARRL within the last four years.

My methodology was, in the case of duplicates, to keep the most current year’s data as I feel that is most likely to be the data used by the majority of stations for the current year.  The one caveat is that there may be a lot more “Q” stations in the contest this year than the history file would indicate.  It seemed to me there were way more Q stations on for the SS CW this year, which I attribute to the 80th anniversary of the SS, point scoring for Q stations and the award certificates for working 80 or more Q stations.

As always, use the prefill exchange information carefully as a tool, not as gospel.  By sure to verify the prefill data by accurately copying what the station you are working is actually sending.  The download link to this file is below.

 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8fee6ud01yw2it3/ARRL%20SS%20SSB%20History.adi

73,
Gary AL9A