[Dx4win] Summits on the Air (award)

[Jim Reisert AD1C]

I've asked about interest in the Summits on the Air award in the past.
 Remarkably, I finally have a DX4WIN award module for it (modules,
actually).

Here is the issue:  DX4WIN only allows eight-character award reference
numbers.  For example, here is an entry from the Worked Polish Cities
award:

    WPC-03=Biala Podlaska

The award reference is WPC-03 (as a user, you never see this, unless
it's also part of the award value), and the award value you see in the
"Award Value" field of the QSO window is "Biala Podlaska".  In this
example "WPC-03" is the reference that must be eight characters or
less.  This is true for all awards in DX4WIN.

The problem with "Summits on the Air" is that some of the award
references are very long, for example:

    HB0/LI-001,Liechtenstein,Vorder Grauspitz  (10 characters).

I could try taking out some of the non-alpha-numeric characters, but
then printing out a worked listing would be kind of hard to read,
since it would look something like:

    HB0LI001 = Vorder Grauspitz

(a Custom Award listing is the only place you'll see the actual award
name reference that is stored in your logbook).

Instead, I decided to break up Summits on the Air into a separate
award module for each prefix, for example, EA1, EA2, EA3, EA4, EA5 and
EA7 are six separate "awards".  This results in the following:

LI-001 = Vorder Grauspitz

Yes, the "prefix/" is missing, but all counters for this award would
be for the same prefix group, which should be part of the custom award
name, i.e.:

    SOTA - Liechtenstein (HB0)

One of the advantages of this method is that when you are adding the
SOTA value to a QSO, the "Award Name" field will only show the SOTA
award(s) valid for that prefix -- you can only add one of the above
Spanish summit areas when the Prefix of the QSO field is EA.
Furthermore, it will save you time finding the Award Value (for
example, "Vorder Grauspitz") because instead of their being 45,000+
(total summits) to choose from, you'll only have to choose from fewer
than 15,000 summits (W7-land has the most).

If people are interested in tracking this award, I can put up a
preliminary version of the new award database for testing.  If my
proposed solution is unacceptable, I can go the way suggested above,
but I'm afraid of the (possible future) case where the prefix is three
characters and the summit number is four characters, such that
removing the '/' and '-' would still leave a reference of nine (3+2+4)
characters, which is too long for DX4WIN.  I wouldn't know what else
to remove.

I'm happy to do what people want.  If you're interested in trying the
SOTA award, send me an E-mail.

73 - Jim AD1C

-- 
Jim Reisert AD1C, <jjreisert at alum.mit.edu>, http://www.ad1c.us