This weekend I won’t be near the shack. I’ll skip WAE RTTY. That doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything for the hobby.
For "future use" I’m making my own StackMatch. There are several homebrewed versions out there: T93M, SM0W and my friend ON4BAI all succeeded in building one. Only: mine does not work YET. It seems that I’m having problems to wind the 2:1 balun. All the mentioned versions use bare insulated wire without outer jacket, but I saw this which gave me the idea to use this "parallel wire". That makes it easier to keep the wires together and parallel. Maybe that is my problem? Back to the rawing board it is!
Yesterday I completed a software project. It’s finished and working (at least something that does!) but I need to tweak the user interface. I use DX4WIN as my general DX log and award tracking software. But I’d like to start using the Global QSL service which needs the QSL VIA info exported into ADIF. I’m still with DX4WIN V6 which doesn’t export QSL managers in the ADIF file and I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT want to buy another upgrade to migrate to V7. I’m sick of that. DX4WIN is dead – it doesn’t evolve anymore and user support is… "not so good". All upgrades I did since buying the program late 2000 have cost 25Euro but were mere bug fixes. So like hell I’m going to pay for yet another silly "upgrade". There is an alternative software suggested by the globalQSL folks but I like to use my DX4WIN QSL info in stead of adding it manually by going through the log. That’s what I want to avoid.
DX4WIN allows exporting the QSL mgr database to an ASCII file so I wrote my own ADIF parser that takes the call from the QSO and sees if there is a match in the QSL MGR file. If the DX call has a manager, my software inserts the right ADIF tag. There you go, that was a Friday well spent!
All for now, 73 / CU.