Neal, a couple of comments re your latest on Updater...and maybe Joe has already mentionned these to you.
DXBase uses prefixes as "country codes" in the program logic...ARRL primarily uses the numeric codes, which as far as I know are not present anywhere in DXBase and can therefore be ignored by DXBase. ARRL DOES use prefix country codes in printouts/reports/forms purely for reader convenience to identify countries in a way familiar to the users. in this regard, the Czech rep/Slovak Rep situation is a good indicator of how to deal with the old/new issue. ARRL assigned "old" Czechoslovakia an OK1 designator in place of previous OK designator. OK1 was "linked" to the Czechoslovakia country code replacing OK in their system. Then Czech Rep was assigned the OK prefix (and OM for Slovak Rep) along with a new numeric code. DXBase could handle prefix codes in a similar way I believe. When the new ARRL prefix designators come out to replace PJ2 and PJ7 (might be PJ9 and PJ8 for example...just my guess, need to await ARRL), DXBase could set them up as primary prefixes with the same data as presently contained in PJ2 and PJ7, and then recode all pre-10/10/10 qsos to the new designator (edit/replace function). (Minor problem is the first 4 hours of 10/10/10 each user would have to change manually later.) Then DXBase would rename PJ2 and PJ7 to their new official names (assuming ARRL reuses these as they did with OK) (data wouldn't change), and add PJ4 and PJ6 (assuming that is what ARRL assigns) with appropriate data. Then go through the prefix mapping to reassign PJ1-0 to their new primaries as of 10/10/10 and after. Might have to look for any special PJ call prefix maps as well, or perhaps leave that to the users as there probably aren't many if any. re Bonaire IOTA, don't see the problem. IOTAs are not inserted into the qso database the way prefixes are, rather they are entered qso by qso by the user. existing Bonaire qsos with the "old" IOTA number should be left alone; they keep that number. after 10/10/10 if a user enters a PJ4 qso they would simply insert the new IOTA number as they normally do. (of course the IOTA database should be updated by adding the new IOTA in the normal way.) I'm not a programmer but all this seems to be doable using existing DXBase functions (not unlike the example in the manual re VR, VP6 etc), albeit time consuming...certainly an Updater would be profoundly helpful! Hank KF2O ______________________________________________________________ Dxbase mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/dxbase Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
