[WriteLog] A Learning Experience in the WAE CW Contest

[Keith Beebe W3KB]

I am a WriteLog contesting software user.

I was operating in the weekend's Worked All Europe (WAE) CW contest and had 110 QSOs and 25 QTCs (Messages) as of early Saturday morning. I had planned to operate all weekend.

All of a sudden there were multiple electrical power "Blips" (rapid On-Off)  that happened.  That "crashed" the computer logging the contest.

When I got back in operation I noticed my 110 contacts were still in the log but my QTC's were not.  What's going on?

I had to drop out of the WAE CW contest because my QTC's were gone and the Writelog software now thought I was back to QTC #1.  Could not realistically send another QTC because the content tracking of the specific messages and their composition plus the QTC numbers were gone.

Writelog does indeed have a safety mechanism for such situations in that it has what they call a "journal" backup file in case things like power outages happen.  It makes a journal of the log during a contest.

However, here's the part of that operation that I missed.  "These changes (QTCs) are Not written to the journal file and Cannot be recovered if you exit or crash without saving your log."

For this specific contest Writelog does not automatically backup QTCs during the logging process.  It recommends periodically Manually saving the log during the contest. Well, I didn't do that and of course along comes the power "blips".

I should have looked closer to Writelog's setup instructions for this specific contest.

At least I now know what happened and now know what to do in the future specifically for the WAE CW contest.

Keith W3KB