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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