Logs are more than just QSOs

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n3gb
Logs are more than just QSOs

I returned to ham radio last fall after being (mostly) inactive for almost 30 years. On of my first tasks to try to catch up with technology was to enter all my old log books into CQRLOG. Typing the QSOs was tedious but very nostalgic - seeing the new DXCC entries appear, old friends' calls from 75m chats, psyching out old propagation patterns (10m will come back, soon I hope), etc. The log books are now done, but I'm only ~half way through the box of contest logs.

But there was a lot of information in the logs that I didn't enter - station changes("TS-830 installed"), operating notes to self("80m stubs added, tuned to 3530, take them off for 75"), guest ops, contests, DXCC submissions, even antenna plans/dimensions.

I thought of a separate log ("History.log") which consisted of QSOs with my call and only certain fields filled with dates and text comments, or pointers to (separate) contest logs. I could still merge this with every other log to demarcate changes, but they wouldn't stand out very well. Other formats (.txt, .odf) don't merge as easily as .adf to give a full history.

How do other CQRLOG users handle this?

oh1kh
Logs are more than just QSOs

HI!

Never thought about station history log. But why not!
I have logbook in my boat where I write down date,times, source,destination and conditions. In same book I also write down special events, services etc.
Yes, also Ham station could have that kind of information history.

I have two suggestions:

1st and simpler one is to log a "qso" to your own callisgn when you get date and time, perhaps also band (in case of antennas), and use column "comment to callsign".
You can write a long note to that column where you can tell what changes you did made then. That is saved to log database as "long text"
(ref. mysql doc: LONGTEXT can store the maximum characters among all four, up to 4,294,967,295 characters i,e 4,294,967,295 bytes or 4GB. )

There is sure enough room to tell things. But I think adif export/import can not handle that long tag, hi.

2nd one is more flexible, but information is not stored to log database. So backing up it needs other things than adif export.
Open cqrlog's help and at left frame navigate to "Operation/Additional notes to callsign".
There you see a way how you can store all kinds of documents tied to a callsign. You just need to name these documents so that you see from name what and when you did it. I.E. "2000-01-30_Ts830_install.pdf" and so on.

You have to create a folder named by callsign to your home folder like : /home/saku/.config/cqrlog/call_data/oh1kh (my linux username is saku, put your's instead) and then put all your documents there.
Then when you enter your callsign to NewQSO cqllsign colum and exit from that (with tab, or mouse) you see that new icon "callsign has attachment" appears. There is no need to log qso to get the icon that shows the list of document names in that folder.

You just need remember two things:
Set your filebrowser to show "hidden files and folders" and you find the ".config" folder from your home directory.

Do regular backups copying folder ~/.config/cqrlog with all files and subfolders to safe place when cqrlog is not running. That will also save all your logs and settings with your station history.

I think you can save your station history using either one of these ways.

--
Saku
OH1KH