Hi Folks,
If you are not tracking the Parks on the Air (POTA) Custom Award in
DX4WIN, you can skip this message. The following mainly applies to
users of DX4WIN 9.x.
PLEASE SEE THE QUESTIONS AT THE END. I do not want to make a change
that is going to hurt more people than it helps!!
The POTA group started issuing 5-digit reference numbers for parks in the USA:
K-10000=Power City State Fish and Wildlife Area [OR]
This causes a problem in DX4WIN because Custom Award reference numbers
are sorted strictly alphabetically. This means that these new park
numbers will get sorted like the following:
K-0999=Illini State Park [IL]
K-10000=Power City State Fish and Wildlife Area [OR]
K-10001=Jewell Meadows State Fish and Wildlife Area [OR]
K-10002=Ladd Marsh State Fish and Wildlife Area [OR]
K-10003=Phillip W. Schneider State Fish and Wildlife Area [OR]
K-10004=Bob Pyle Marsh Wildlife Management Area [IA]
...
K-10008=Klamath Hills BLM Recreation Management Area [OR]
K-10009=Row River National Recreation Trail [OR]
K-1000=Illinois Beach State Park [IL]
K-10010=Fishermen's Bend BLM Recreation Management Area [OR]
K-10011=OC&E Woods Line State Trail State Trail [OR]
You can see that K-10000 follows K-0999 (instead of K-9999) and K-1000
is listed between between K-10009 and K-10010. This may make it hard
to find the correct park number when logging a QSO.
My proposed fix for this is to increase the reference numbers for
parks in (only) the USA from 4 to 5 digits. This means that:
K-0001=Acadia National Park [ME]
becomes:
K-00001=Acadia National Park [ME]
If the cost of making this change is worse than the cost of having the
sorting by reference number be messed up, I can re-think this.
While fixing this, it exposed another problem that I did not
anticipate. When the POTA program started, parks in the USA were
given reference numbers beginning KFF-, such as this:
KFF-0001=Acadia National Park [ME]
At some point in the program, they changed all the reference numbers
to use K- instead:
K-0001=Acadia National Park [ME]
I thought I had changed the Custom Awards database for this, but I did
not. I would like to make this change now. However, each user will
need to run a Multiple QSO operation, Check Custom Awards, to map the
old KFF- reference numbers to the new K- reference numbers. If you do
this correctly, it won't affect any other Custom Awards that you may
track in DX4WIN. I will send more details when I release the new
Custom Awards database.
For users of DX4WIN 8.05 and earlier:
1. I can not change the reference numbers from KFF- to K- for users
of DX4WIN 8.05 and earlier because there is no multiple QSO operation
to do to that.
2. For the 5-digit parks in the USA, instead of KFF-10000, they will
look like KF-10000. That is because DX4WIN only supports up to 8
characters for a custom award reference number, and KFF-10000 would be
9 characters, or one too many. This limitation was fixed in DX4WIN
9.x.
So for people who track the Parks on the Air custom award in DX4WIN
9.x, which of the following do you prefer?
Proposal #1 - leave the 4-digit reference numbers for USA as they are
today. Add the new 5-digit reference numbers, knowing that sorting by
reference number will not be quite right.
Proposal #2 - convert all existing 4-digit reference numbers for USA
parks to 5-digits. This fixes the sorting, but will require an extra
leading 0 to find a park, for example, K-1234
--
Jim Reisert AD1C, <jjreis...@alum.mit.edu>, https://ad1c.us
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