Hi Jim,
I think going to all 5-digit numbers for US parks has a benefit, at least
for the way I use the list to enter parks. When I work a POTA activation as
a hunter, I select POTA in the custom award field, tab to the Custom award
value field, press F1 then F2, then start typing the park number. For most
US parks this is fine, but it turns out that there are currently 456 parks
in Columbia, type doing a search for K-0400 initially brings up HK-0400. The
way I get around this is to right-click and turn off "search substring", and
then the search will match. If you go to 5 digit numbers K-00400 will only
match the US park, which solves the problem for me. If there's a way to
permanently turn off search substring I guess this would be a non-issue.
I don't have any parks with KFF- numbers so I can't comment on that piece.
I'm happy to try out a test version to see how that impacts my workflow
(hamflow?) if that would help.
73,
David, K2DBK
-----Original Message-----
From: dx4win-boun...@mailman.qth.net <dx4win-boun...@mailman.qth.net> On
Behalf Of Jim Reisert AD1C
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2023 4:58 PM
To: DX4WIN Reflector <dx4win@mailman.qth.net>
Subject: [Dx4win] Custom Award database update to fix Parks on the Air
(POTA)
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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