Thanks for the nice information, Asle!
We were briefed by several users of the fact that the ARRL will not accept printed logbook reports for contest application unless in the so called CABRILLO format after the 1. September 2000. More details may be found at:
www.kkn.net/~trey/CABRILLO/qso-template.html
This gave rise for starting to include the most important report templates in TL well ahead of the deadline.
Here is the full story:
1. What is Cabrillo?
Cabrillo is a set of QSO templates in printed reports from contests. These templates were standardized by the ARRL for ease of fast and easy contest evaluations. The requested report standards go far beyond the formats which were implemented in TL as yet. Thus we had to perform a large reconstruction and extension of the existing code. Principal guide line was to keep all proven procedures as they were and add the new ones along this line.
2. How does it work?
If you use the F9-facilities in order to move into contest real time logging you now have the following choices on the contest menu:
- Standard TurboLog Contest Mode...........as before, plus:
- ARRL, CQ, Stew Perry Contest.............a new choice
- Sweepstakes Contests.....................the second new choice
- NAQP, NA Sprint, California QSO Party....the third new choice
Provisions are taken to place additional contests on this list. If you open "A" you will see the familiar prompts which are needed for any contest. If you open any of the other options you will see prompts for specific data which either needs to be included in the print reports or exchanged within a valid contest QSO in addition to just serial numbers. After you have completed all inputs TL is ready to start the contest operation. If you now step along the red input line you will be prompted for input of the specific informations exchanged during that contest. You can move left and right by means of the Cursor-Down key as you are used to in "normal" QSO logging operations. The info which you input will be packed into the comment field and can be inspected and/or edited as before ( F8-toggle key, F6--->F6 for review, respectively).
3. How do I get my log results printed?
After you have finished contesting you move into the "Logbook & DXCC- applic." listings. All familiar menu items are available as before. You pass all QSOs and filter by dates or QSO-numbers before you arrive at the key new feature "CABRILLO". If you select this output format a menu box opens from which you select the appropriate report template. The following options are well known standards....and there is the print in the requested ARRL format.
Done!
The rest is performed by the contest evaluation team.....as we understand the whole procedure.
Under CABRILLO TL automatically performs the transition from SSB, CW, RTTY and FM to the ARRL two letter abreviations PH, CW, RY and FM respectively. Bands are also reformatted according to the ARRL standards. If you come across an " A " you should bear in mind: this is the requested output for 50MHz and by no means a bug...
Of course you can still print all contest results with TL's standard printing facilities and menu options. In this case even the contest QSOs show up in the well known formats and abreviations which have been in TL right from the beginning.
Please note:
The call entered into the QSO-templates is derived from the LOGNAME which is displayed in the left corner of the top/banner line. As mentioned above the logname must always be a valid callsign for this reason!!
Along with the LOCATOR-listings we restructured the code of the Lists & Report facilities in order to have a maximum commonality among them. This was a quite ambitious task, but it had to been done after all. The code is now implemented in terms of so called "objects" following modern "object oriented" software design. You don't see it but it pays for the future and for your benefits.
If you enter the LOCATOR menu you will find the following submenus:
Each of these submenus again has a couple of subitems which you should be familiar with from the long existing list operations. The choices which are offered are self explaining and straight forward. They cover virtually every investigation in locators we can think of ( for the time being ). Your selection of parameters can be saved for future use in a file which you may name. The file extension is automatically generated and will be .LCF .
Please also note, since there are 32.400 squares in total we decided to better suppress printing if you chose the scope "Not worked all time". However, the output will still show your missing totals.
On your choice from EXECUTE you will finally get a list of locators formatted to a table with eight entries per line. Along with the table comes the locator count. The results are presented on the selected output device.
You can now write the data to a file and in case of troubles send this file to us for close inspection ( preferably by E-mail ). TL generates two distinct trace files under the root directory. TL3TNC.TRC will contain handshake data communicated with the TNC whilst TL3CAT.TRC will take care for the CAT data.
Please note:
Both files will be overwritten on every new "save"-command. Thus only the latest TRC-files are kept under the TURBOLOG directory.