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USERKEY and Keyword Facility |
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This field plays a very important role in data retrieval and continues to serve for the well proven purposes established in TL III. This facility has been greatly extended in TurboLog 4 now. There are 64 characters available to tag a QSO for unlimited purposes such as awards, club members, districts, zones, states, islands (IOTA), lighthouses, US counties, etc, just to mention a few applications. There is virtually no limit on the number of userkeys used. You can enter as many userkeys (tags) into the userkey field as there is space available.
If you enter more than one userkey into the field your entries have to be separated by a comma. Even Multiple Keywords, distinct but of the same kind which are often used in RDA operations are permitted in just one Userkey Field, e.g.: O-AD-02,O-AD-03,O-AD-04,
Please note: The paragraph on Keyword Listings below outlines Keyword Operations in greater details.
Besides important assistance in reports and other data retrieval tasks there still is the very fast userkey search by a hot key. You can start the search from any text field into which you have entered a userkey to search for. Pressing Ctrl+I will pop up a dialogue box in which you need to click the Accept button in order to start the search. Likewise you can alter the search key or abort the search. As a result of the search all QSOs tagged with the userkey entry under test will be displayed. The filtering facilities will allow you to search for any combinations of userkeys among each other or combined with other fields.
Userkeys need to be contained in a special definition file. This file must be a plain ASCII file. Make sure the file contains only characters belonging to the ANSI character set. In order to create a keyword file of your own you can either modify one of the existing examples in ...\TL4DATA with the mandatory file extension of UID or follow the generic outline as below:
The line has to be started by a ; though. There is no comment allowed in between or at the end of the file.
The last line of data closes the file and must not be followed by anything else.
Although you can create userkey definition files to your personal liking we strongly recommend to make use of the following definitions:
Just for better rendering the content of the table in the Online Help:
In any case and whatever userkey system you create all definitions must be unique in the sense that no design scheme is allowed which generates identical strings originating from different userkey groups. If you followed the definitions as above in TL III the import will be straight forward. This applies for the import from TL III as well as from ADIF.
TurboLog Communications maintains special keyword files which serve for reporting on userkey achievements, e.g. IOTA, WAZ, WAS, US counties, DOKs, etc. Typically your tagged QSOs will be displayed or printed against a table of all existing keywords belonging to one group, e.g. IOTA. Sticking to this example the table currently has about 1200 lines ( = active IOTA references ). However, the lighthouses file contains more than 15.000 entries worldwide: A lifetime challenge to work those... .
Please note: TurboLog 4 comes with a standard set of keyword files. All keyword files are to be stored in the ...\TL4DATA subdirectory.
Despite the userkey's importance in reporting and data retrieval tasks the keyword field does not belong to the QSO essentials. In view of these benefits, however, we strongly recommend to maintain this field on the active part of the log input line.
Please note: There is no checking for data integrity with respect to this field while the QSO is logged.
Like all other fields the userkey field can be customized on the loginput line. All features described for customizing the loginput line apply for this field.
Active COMMANDS: See table in loginput line.
CLICKABLES and HOTSPOTS: Every input field can be clicked: See loginput line.
This topic was last edited on Monday, 03-Jul-2023, at 23:57
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