It seems a tradition among radio amateurs to name file standards according to the place where they were conceived. Maidenhead (grid square locator) and Cabrillo (contest file format) and apparently also Stützerbach where DARC’s STF was invented.
I didn’t know STF until yesterday. UBA Contest Manager Marc ON7SS told me over Skype he was checking the Fieldday CW logs. For cross checking purposes, there is an exchange of FD logs between some of the R1 IARU societies. Major player is of course DARC although HB9 (USKA) is pretty active in FD too. Marc received a few hundred logs in the STF format. His checking soft expects Cabrillo but it takes him a few mouse clicks per log to make the conversion from STF to CBR. Few mouse clicks times few hundred logs = boring job indeed.
He didn’t even had to ask after he exposed the problem. I asked a few representative STF files and went to work. It’s been a long time since I wrote some code but it actually was fun again. Of course it’s an easy ‘problem’: parse an STF file, split the lines so you get the different parts of the QSO and re-order them per Cabrillo specs. Add some extras (header) and write to a new file in a new folder.
This is standard stuff that I have mastered by now without googling for code. I was able to reuse some of the log processing routines I wrote in the past and provided a start button that processes all files in one folder (STF) and writes a Cabrillo into another folder. It took me about an hour to makes this work. Then a few bug fixes because the number of spaces in the Cabrillo log seemed to matter for ON7SS’s program. And because I was in a Lazy Sunday Sloppy Code mood (copy/paste and forget to edit). 😉