Folks, We've been studying the LoTW files that some of you have sent to us. We'd like you to be aware that the ARRL's team has made some pretty serious mistakes in their implementation of the ADIF standard.
Primarily, the problems appear to be the result of the ARRL's team not validating what is submitted to them. This causes some problems when the data is imported and will come back to haunt the ARRL when they allow their master database to become so large that cleaning up the mess will be monumental for them. For example, 1. They are allowing Canadian Province two letter abbreviations to be placed in the US State field of the ADIF file. This is an error and there is a separate field in the ADIF standard for Canadian Province information. 2. They are allowing IOTA information to be incorrectly formatted. The ADIF standard specifies that an IOTA should be provided as NA-123. The dash is required. The ARRL's team is allowing a space instead of the dash such as NA 123. 3. They are allowing county names to be misspelled. For those of you who are active with the ARRL's team, you may wish to advise them that they have some issues here which are a problem for anyone who has implemented the ADIF standard. These same issues will ultimately lead to database integrity problems for them as well. Cheers, Jack
