Six faults from an evening on 60 m, all in the same family: the engine
judging a station by what the log wants from it and forgetting what is
already under way.
- An exchange was abandoned mid-QSO. The reply lands in the same period
the ladder is re-read, and that period was judged before the reply was
taken into account, so a better-ranked caller took the slot from a
station that had just come back to us. The answer is settled first now,
and our own report counts as being inside the exchange too — which also
protects a QSO the operator started by hand.
- A station just picked started with misses against it. Its transmit slot
was unknown until a second decode, and with the parity unknown every
period counted, including the one spent transmitting to it.
- The freed slot after "it is working somebody else" was thrown away: the
period's decodes are in hand, so the next station is picked from them
rather than fifteen seconds later. Never mid-over.
- Auto-call is never armed from a stored setting — not at launch, not on
a profile switch. It is the one feature that puts the station on the
air by itself and OpsLog starts with Windows.
- It says what it is waiting for: a wanted station in a QSO with somebody
else now shows beside the Auto button instead of looking idle.
- Switching profile left the previous logbook's verdicts on screen. The
worked-index, chase-new and the frontend's cached verdicts are dropped
when the logbook changes.
FT decodes: distance column, a message addressed to you set whole in
green (the station you are calling keeps a tint — most of what it sends
goes to other people), badge order L / Wkd / WL, list cleared when the
RIG changes band.
Rotor: new world-map compass from EC1KD's design, with the Ultrabeam boom
and second lobe restored and the compact form preserved; the classic dial
is kept and Settings → Rotator chooses between them. Stop no longer
flickers on a rotor standing still — movement was inferred from a degree,
less than the jitter a controller reports at rest.
Six faults, all found on the air this evening and all in the same
feature. The decision trace added here is what found the first one:
one line per period, saying what was on the air and why each station
was refused.
- "worked" was read from the ENTITY's status, which means the country
is in the log on this band and mode. On 10 m, where most countries
are, twenty decodes out of twenty-one were refused as worked — the
watched DXpedition among them. The entity decides what is NEEDED;
the callsign's own slot decides whether calling it is a duplicate.
candidateOf() is split out and tested because one line was wrong for
weeks and nothing could catch it.
- A multi-answer line was read only up to its first message. MSHV
answers two stations in one transmission ("YV5ALI RR73; F4BPO
<HK0/PY8WW> -08") and the second half was a report to us: the engine
saw a station working somebody else and dropped the target at the
moment the DX was answering. The decodes panel already read every
segment.
- The slot after a QSO belongs to our own 73. Handing straight on to
the next station took it, switching the DX call mid-sequence, and
the frame that closes the contact never went out whole.
- A station CALLING US is answered whether or not the log wants
anything from it. It was refused for having nothing to gain, so a
QSO would end, two stations would call, and both were ignored.
- Callability was tested when a station was CHOSEN and never again
while it was held: one picked on its CQ that then answered another
caller went on being called for the whole seven attempts.
- A watched callsign now outranks every station that is not on the
list. Lifted one rung at a time it sat at the bottom with nothing
needed from it, and was never reached on a busy band — the opposite
of what putting it on the list means.
Halt is now a verdict: the station is set aside for the session rather
than released, and the chase list does not override it. The attempts
cap lets the over finish instead of cutting the call that counted it,
and a rest is a rest. Only what the decodes list is SHOWING can be
called — the panel publishes the callsigns it shows, so there is one
definition of "shown" and not two.
rouggy