On 29/10/2017 18:43, Rich - K1HTV wrote:
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.
HI Rich,
dealing with Guinea call signs as a special case in WSJT-X is not simply
a matter of changing cty.dat, far from it. We compress call signs
algorithmically by making assumptions about the format of call signs. We
cannot change the underlying format of encoded callsigns as that causes
a huge compatibility issue, but we can add some special rules to handle
some edge cases. Here for example we might decide to discard the 'Y'
from the 3XY prefix when encoding on the basis that it is always there.
The decoder would then automatically add a 'Y' to any decoded '3X'
prefix. This is almost exactly what is done with 3DA0 call signs, we
drop the 'A' as given when encoding and re-insert it when decoding any
3D0 prefix.
This approach only works if all '3D?0' prefixes are actually '3DA0'
prefixes. Can we say the same for '3XY' prefixes? I doubt it, all the
'3X' prefixes are allocated to Guinea and there have been some calls
with prefixes different from '3XY' already.
I'm not saying there is no way to deal with 3XY prefixes, just that it
is non-trivial.
73
Bill
G4WJS.
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