Hi Joe, As I mentioned, I understand what the users manual stated about the format of call signs as I also quoted it. However, in the case of the 3XY prefix, it has been used for over 18 years. Since 1999 I've made 63 QSOs with stations operating in Guinea and 46 of them were assigned the 3XY prefix include 3XD2Z, 3XM6JR, 3XY2D, 3XY8A, 3XY6A, 3XY7C, 3XY1L, 3XY1D, 3XY0A, 3XY1T, 3XY3D/p and today 3XY4D.
I understand the reluctance of making 3XY a special case, but over the years, the majority of the assigned calls for Guinea have had the prefix 3X plus another letter, a number and 1 to 3 letters. Since the 1980 start of my electronic log of 131K+ QSOs, I found a total of only 106 QSOs with such formatted prefixes. So unless a general exception can be made for calls of that format I guess the DX station stuck with such a call sign and those of us calling him will just have to deal with the occasional confusion that will occur when such a station call sign shows up. Since a similar prefix, 3DA0 does not result in this problem, I guess the best fix would get the folks who maintain the CTY.DAT database to add "3XY" to the existing "3X" valid prefix for Guinea. Thanks again to you and the WSJT-X development team for a great piece of communications software. With 75 Watts, an A3S and wire antennas, as of this writing I've made 7823 FT8 QSOs in 176 countries. FT8 is GREAT! 73, Rich - K1HTV = = = Joe Taylor, K1JT wrote: The behavior you described is no surprise to anyone who has read the definition of what's treated as a standard callsign in any of the slow modes in WSJT-X. See, for example, the original defining document for JT65: J. Taylor, K1JT, "The JT65 Communications Protocol" (QEX, September-October 2005, p 3): http://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/JT65.pdf ... or the WSJT-X User Guide here: http://www.physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx-doc/wsjtx-main-1.8.0.html#PROTOCOLS Relevant text: "A standard amateur callsign consists of a one- or two-character prefix, at least one of which must be a letter, followed by a digit and a suffix of one to three letters." The callsign 3XY4D does not follow this worldwide standard convention. For this reason, the messages you showed are all treated as free-text messages. I am sure it is very frustrating for 3XY4D, and also for those trying to work him (as I did, yesterday, by using free text messages in FT8). In principle, we could make a "3XY" an acceptable, three-character prefix, as a special case. Not a very attractive possibility, but... -- 73, Joe, K1JT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
