[SFDXA] LOTW

[Tom Lewis (at home)]

Here is my experience with ARRL's LOTW software and instructions.

I spent about 1.5 hours reading the material, downloading the software, running it and sending in the results for 2 logs.

The quick.txt is easy to follow. DXBASE 2003 generated an ADIF file my logs. I have one log for band countries and one for contests. The ARRL software converts the ADIF file to a "Signed log submission" file. It takes about a minute per 1000 QSLs for the conversion. This is running on a 1 GHz Pentium III machine. One of my files is 2406 QSLs and took about 3 minutes to run. The ADIF file for this log is 757 KB and the output file is 390 KB. The ARRL requires that this file be sent to them in an email which I did. That took about 5 minutes to send with my dial up connection. Just to see what would happen I ZIPed the 390 KB file and the resulting ZIP file is about the same size. So the ARRL would not save file space asking people to ZIP the file before sending it in.

There were errors with my submission and I sent in a bug report.

Error in record 3: MODE: Invalid value in field (USB)
Error in record 24: MODE: Invalid value in field (LSB)

It took CW okay and I don't know about RTTY or other modes.

73 Tom N4TL