PVRC Reunion 2026 & Pre-Fill Logging Enhancement

[Bill Axelrod]

     The 2025 PVRC Reunion On The Air ended a month ago.  And it was sure
fun!  Conditions were not that great but what was great was working as many
of you on the air as possible.  Hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.
And, I'm already looking forward to 2026.

     It took a lot of work to make this year's reunion happen.  Tim, N3QE,
spent a lot of time designing and coding a User Designed Contest (UDC) file
for the reunion.  A UDC is needed to make it possible to use N1MM+ for
reunion logging.  He posted the reunion UDC on our website and it worked
perfectly.  Thanks Tim.  Developing a UDC is not a simple task and the "how
to" documentation is far from perfect.

     One issue that arose was the lack of a call history file (CH) that we
could use to prefill the log like we use for most contests.

     The current PVRC CH file is one that I built to supplement an existing
CH file for all other contests.  It just tells us if someone in a PVRC
member and his/her name.  Works fine, but it was not written to prefill any
log data.

     So, I decided to build a CH file for the reunion that does.  That
turned out to be an adventure that required me to rewrite both the UDC and
CH files.

     Slowly but surely it came around.  I got it working so it would
prefill all the PVRC reunion data fields, except one - "the call when
joined" field.

     Just couldn't get there.  I reached out for help.  First, I contacted
Claude (AKA Dub) VE2FK who is the master class guru for CH files.  He
couldn't get there either.  He suggested I contact one of our own, Nick
NA3M, a PVRC member in our Northwest chapter. Nick is a member of the N1MM+
software team.

     Nick agreed to help and help he did.  Along the way he found and fixed
a minor bug in N1MM+ that was in our way.  And he found ways to make my UDC
and CH files better.

     So now, we have a PVRC reunion UDC and CH files that do everything we
want.  I filled the CH with data from our PVRC member database and with
logs from K3MM, N0YY, and me.

     So, we're ready to go for 2026.  But we do need your help.  We need
more fill information.  The PVRC database does not hold "call when joined"
data.  And the "year joined" data is not available for some of us.

     So, two requests.

     First, please check your roster on the PVRC website.  If your "year
joined" field is empty or incorrect, please either update your roster entry
or drop me an email with your year joined and I'll take it from there.

     Second, if your call was different when you joined PVRC, please drop
me an email with that original call.

     Thanks!

73...   Bill K3WA