[WriteLog] ARRL SS CW prefill adi file

[Gary AL9A]

Dan K0TI wins first place in the “Who can find the problem in the adi file?” contest!  Thanks Dan.  He correctly spotted that despite having Excel remove duplicates some dupes still existed in the file.

This is because as far as Excel is concerned they are not dupes!  Closer inspection reveals that for some unknown reason a few calls contain a nonprinting character that is invisible to the naked eye.  Once discovered I ran an Excel Text Function called Clean that removes nonprintable characters from a text string.  Another run of the Remove Duplicates function removed 129 duplicate records, exactly the number that was off.

WriteLog has a strange method of dupe detection when loading prefill files.  If it finds a dupe it keeps the dupe and discards the first record loaded.  This is not what is wanted as in my adi file the dupe record is an older record and it should be ignored.  Removing all the duplicates resolves the issue.  There are now 2,988 unique records in the file and all of them load correctly into WL.  The updated file can be downloaded at:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0somp8wjuow0pxn/ARRL%20SS%20CW%20Call%20History%202009-2013_V2.adi?dl=0

Thanks again Dan!

73,
Gary AL9A




From: Dan Karg 
Sent: October 27, 2014 4:29 PM
To: Gary AL9A 
Subject: Re: [WriteLog] ARRL SS CW prefill adi file
Gary,
I think the reason your seeing a difference in whats in the file and what WL loads is you still have some dupes in there. I see I'm in there twice
and a bunch zero's are also duplicated.



Dan K0TI



On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Gary AL9A <al9a at mtaonline.net> wrote:

  For those who may be interested in the upcoming ARRL SS CW contest next weekend....

  I have updated my SS CW call history file to include the 2013 csv results database information for those stations who submitted logs to the ARRL last year.  The file now contains 3,117 call sign records, but WL only loads 2,988 of them.  I am checking to see if I can find out why WL doesn't like 129 records and bypasses them on the load.  In the meantime I will release the file as is so you can begin to exercise it with your logs prior to next Saturday's start.  If I can find and correct the problem I will release an update at that time.

  This file contains information from the 2009 through 2013 contests.  There is some data irregularity from the 2009 and 2010 results data files.  These historical data files contain field headings for the CK, but the actual CK data is missing.  When subsequent years results are appended and then duplicates removed there are a number of records that have no data for the CK field.  If a station submitted a log in 2011, 2012 or 2013 then the CK information is there.  If you get a prefill record with a missing CK number during the contest it is because this call has not submitted a log in the last three years which would have provided this information.  Just be aware that from time to time you may get a prefill that has the CK number absent. You will have to copy this off the air and manually fill it in yourself. But then, you should be reading all the information being sent to verify it is correct before logging the contact anyway!

  This link will download the latest prefill file.

  https://www.dropbox.com/s/xv9i7ik31x2o170/ARRL%20SS%20CW%20Call%20History%202009-2013.adi?dl=0

  This link will download a set of instructions on how to use the prefill file within WriteLog in case you have never done this before.

  https://www.dropbox.com/s/mckz6zbuklff0up/WriteLog%20Prefill%20Exchange%20file%20loading%20instructions.pdf?dl=0

  73,
  Gary AL9A 
  _______________________________________________
  WriteLog mailing list
  WriteLog at contesting.com
  http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/writelog
  WriteLog on the web:  http://www.writelog.com/




-- 
Dan K0TI