NOTE to the readers: I wonder of there ARE ANY? Make yourself known: on5zo@hotmail.com
SFI
Isn’t it great to see the SFI climb out of the bottom to 87 with A=0? 
Isn’t it a crying shame that this absolutely does NOT reflect on the air? 
I started the ARRL 10m contest yesterday with high expectations. But it took only 5 minutes to realize it’s not ‘here’ yet. Little signals, only noise and lots of repeats for the serial number. I tried 17m and worked the usual UA / UR and a ZL who wasn’t weak. No JA though.
Exit the shack. Enter the laptop.
Processing QSL
Finally I finished processing that huge pile of OQ5M QSL cards.
I tried my homebrew QSL Manager Processing Tool that adds the QSL_VIA field in ADIF using my DX4WIN QSL Manager database. I submitted a sample of my output format to the guys at Global QSL and got a final ‘GO’. So I ordered 1k cards which is really a bargain especially with the favourable Euro-Dollar exchange rate. No more printing labels, sticking, sorting, putting in boxes, driving to the local club to hand the outgoing batch to the club’s QSL manager. Over are the days – just some electronic processing and off we go. Yes!
I uploaded my ADIF and got a minor error. It seems that when copy-pasting a QSL manager from QRZ.COM there could be a problem with an illegal zero. If you look up 5J0A you get WØJAR. Note the slashed zero which isn’t accepted by GlobalQSL. It took me five minutes to add a function that removes this slashed zero and replaces it with a regular zero (0). Reload the ADIF et voilà: 759 QSO’s confirmed and sent via the ‘buro’. That’s a lot of labels! Or better: that WOULD have been a lot of labels.
Crunching numbers
For a while I’ve been thinking to get some statistics out of my logs since I got on HF in December 2000. That’s a lot of work in DX4WIN (I really can’t say much positive about this anymore) and you still need to calculate. So now that I’m on a programming roll, I decided to tackle that and wrote me a tool. It is still VERY MUCH under development and the current release is something like ‘minus zero point 1’. You can see what it looks like below.
This clearly shows a couple of trends:
- I got my ticket December 2000 but didn’t make a lot of contacts.
- End of 2001 I was OQ5ZO with a 3el yagi on 10m and terrific conditions – that was a boost!
- During 2002 I discovered contesting.
- During 2003 we bought the house here and needed to work in it. That resulted in a lot of commuting back and forth. And I had no antennas and no time and conditions took a plunge.
- In 2004 I had the time but no antennas, the tower and yagi got installed the Friday before CQ WW SSB.
- In 2005 I was OO5ZO and made the most QSO’s with this PFX in Belgium. I got a plaque from the UBA‘s president to show for it – my first plaque ever!
- Early 2006 I bought an amp to compensate the loss of the prefix advantage. That’s not the real reason but…
- This year (2007) was scheduled as my sabatical – no comment. There might be some kind of competition playing here.
- As you can see, out of 77.257 contacts 77.230 are made on HF, and 65596 in CW. That’s 85% of my HF contacts in Morse Code.
I need to work on this tool to get a more usefull output but I’m glad I got the engine working. All for now, more later. 73!