[WriteLog] A Learning Experience in the WAE CW Contest

[Jerry Flanders]

I have my computer and monitor on a small UPS (maybe $60 at Costco). If power dies I have plenty of time to do an orderly shutdown. 

Jerry W4UK

> On 08/14/2023 9:29 AM EDT Keith Beebe W3KB <keith at w3kb.net> wrote:
> 
>  
> 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
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