[NLRS] dupe sheet specs

[John P. Toscano]

Glen Overby wrote:
> For the 10ghz contest, what exactly does a 'dupe sheet' consist of?
> 
> The Rules say:
> 
> 	5.5.1. A dupe sheet is an alphanumerically sorted list of all contacts
> 	made during the contest, sorted by band and mode as appropriate. A
> 	list of duplicate contacts does not meet this requirement.
> 
> Since I only have one band, and mode isn't even logged for this contest I
> think it will consist of:  callsign, sent grid, received grid.
> 
> I 'only' had 475 contacts, so I don't have to send along a dupe sheet, but I
> thought I'd try generating one anyway.

Well, the dupe sheet fundamentally needs to have all the fields that 
would demonstrate that two contacts between your station and another 
station are unique (or that they are not, i.e. are dupes), and sorted in 
a manner that the dupes come out adjacent to one another so that they 
can be easily seen.

Although the rules are indeed a bit vague, when I created a dupe sheet 
in my Excel logging program, I included:
   Callsign of station worked
   6-digit Grid of my station
   6-digit Grid of station worked
   Band
   UTC Date
   UTC Time

In order for two contacts to be dupes, all of the first four listed 
fields would need to be identical on the pair of contacts.  If any one 
of them changes from one QSO to the next, the QSO is a valid, 
non-duplicate QSO.

I presume that the UTC Date and UTC Time are not strictly necessary, but 
I provided them so that the log checker could, if they wished, easily 
find the duplicate entries in the main (chronological) log.

I sort these entries by Callsign, then Band, then by Grid Sent, then by 
Grid Received.  The rules only state that the dupe log needs to be 
sorted by alphanumeric callsign (first), then by the other fields that 
determine the uniqueness of the QSO's, so I guess the sort order is not 
important after the primary field of callsign.  I sort by Callsign and 
Band first only because it is used elsewhere to count up the unique 
callsigns by band, in other words, a QSO with WB0LJC on 10 GHz and 
another QSO with WB0LJC on 24 GHz is not a dupe pair, and would net me 
two x 100 points for uniques (if not for the fact that his 10 GHz rig 
broke before I made that contact with him!  Ouch!)

In my spreadsheet, I also include an extra column that pops up with the 
word *DUPE* in the event that two QSO's actually do duplicate one 
another, but that's icing on the cake so to speak.

In your case, since you're in the 10 GHz only category, the Band is not 
an issue, as it will always be the same.  So, the 3 fields you mention 
(my first 3) seem to be sufficient to do the job.

You may want to look at the spreadsheet I'm talking about:
   http://www.nlrs.org/W0JT/10GHz_Logger_v3.xls

I haven't had a chance to look over my own log yet.  Since I had exactly 
500 QSO's last year (one of which was a dupe, leaving me with 499 valid 
contacts), and this year I only played for one of the two weekends, I 
doubt I will be anywhere near 500 QSO's this year.

I hope that all of you did very well this year, and that the Northern 
Lights Radio Society can once again dominate the scores.  Let's all get 
those logs submitted!  (It's been a while since I forgot to submit a 
contest log on time, and I was very lucky that it was only a day late 
and they didn't actually turn it into a checklog because of that.  I 
don't want to tempt fate again!)

73 de W0JT