Here is some observations from the recent IOTA contest.
73 Frank DL2CC and Felix DL5XL
I have been playing around with Writelog V10.18A in this year's IOTA
contest and found it very useful and quite bug-free. There are a few
minor issues I would like to bring up:
Writelog requires all IOTA numbers to have five digits. Most G stations
just send "EU5", but you need to enter "EU005" to log the QSO. Why don't
you just accept all values that beging wit AF, AN, AS, EU, NA, SA, or
OC, followed by any number less then 300 or so, and add the leading
zeros?
Just like the country is derived from the call sign prefix, it would be
nice to display the island group name (and country) from the IOTA number
(SDI by EI5DI does just that). This would prevent accidental logging of
incorrect IOTA references.
When you copy another station's exchange, but do not know the call sign
yet, it would be useful to find out who you have worked before from that
particular island group. I found no way to do just that. Precisely,
I'd like to enter EU127 into the IOTA field and get a list of stations
worked before from that location.
The score box does not keep track of the running multiplier total. You
need to generate a summary sheet and look at it to know you multiplier
score. This should definitely be changed!
Many stations sign "/P" (for "portable") in the IOTA contest (and
sometimes, they forget to add it). As it is highly unlikely to work
both DL5XL/p and DL5XL in the same contest, dupechecking should work
with and without the "/P" identifier, i.e. when you have worked DL5XL/p,
DL5XL should come up as a dupe.
The ADIF export of an IOTA contest log violates the ADIF specification
as published at http://www.hosenose.com/adif/adif.html. The
specification clearly says: "IOTA, TYPE C, HYPHEN MUST BE INCLUDED.
Example: NA-001" while WriteLog exports "<IOTA:5>EU127" instead of the
correct "<IOTA:6>EU-127". It is thus impossible to import the log with
IOTA numbers into a number of logbook programs.
Keep up the good work!
73!
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