CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

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CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by OE6CLD »

Hi all,

This is an issue I found out with all the different W1AW/x activities. By default W1AW is located in CT, so CQ and ITU zone are set to CQ zone 5 and ITU zone 6.

Also if I enter W1AW/7 the same setting will be used.

It would be great and very helpful if changing the US state would reflect in changing the CQ and ITU zone respectively. I know this is not always possible (some states are in two zones), but a default value would be helpful.

Regards,
Claus, OE6CLD/EI7JZ

Code: Select all

W0        Colorado-W, Iowa-W, Kansas-W, Minnesota-W   CQ 04   ITU 07
W0        Missouri,Nebraska,North-Dakota,South-Dakota CQ 04   ITU 07
W1        Connecticut-W, Maine-W, Massachusetts-W     CQ 05   ITU 08
W1        New-Hampshire-W,Rhode-Island-W,Vermont-W    CQ 05   ITU 08
W2        New-Jersey-W, New-York-W                    CQ 05   ITU 08
W3        Delaware-W, D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania    CQ 05   ITU 08
W4        Alabama-W, Florida-W,Georgia-W,Kentucky-W   CQ 04   ITU 08
W4        North-Carolina, South-Carolina, Tennessee   CQ 05   ITU 08
W4        Virginia-W                                  CQ 05   ITU 08
W5        Arkansas-W, Louisiana-W, Mississippi-W      CQ 04   ITU 08
W5        New-Mexico-W, Oklahoma-W, Texas-W           CQ 04   ITU 07
W6        California-W                                CQ 03   ITU 06
W7        Arizona-W, Idaho-W, Montana-W, Nevada-W     CQ 03   ITU 06
W7        Oregon-W, Washington-W, Wyoming-W           CQ 03   ITU 06
W8        Michigan-W, Ohio-W, West-Virginia-W         CQ 04   ITU 08
W9        Illinois-W, Indiana-W, Wisconsin-W          CQ 04   ITU 08
Claus, OE6CLD/DJ0DX/EI7JZ
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by IW3HMH »

Hi Claus,it's very difficult to achieve because we don't know, from the call, where an user is located (or, better, with the required precision).
Also the same logic must be applied to the whole world, and not only to the USA, to be useable and "fair" (why only USA?).

The only sources of informations are the SCL and the ClubLog database, that should be updated to reflect callsign movements.
We're trying to provide the BEST lookup mechanism, but we cannot guarantee the result in all situations, especially if the user doesn't report any information on the numerous services online.

Anyway Chuck K7PT is our COUNTRY wizard, so he can explain and identify possibilities, if any
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by K7PT »

The issue with W1AW/? is there is no information available as to what state the current W1AW/? is operating from. Not from QRZ or any other look-up source.
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by G4POP »

The other thing that makes this nearly impossible, especially with regard to the USA is that due to the call sign system over there a call eg W4xxx could be used in a completely different region.

We have all come across the guy with an Hawaii call sign who now lives on the East coast of the USA and legally uses his Hawaii call from there - "VANITY" call I think they call it!

When I was first licenced you knew exactly what part of the USA a station was because they all conformed to the list that you provided Claus, now that is not the case.

We have a similar situation on other continents but the USA causes most grief in this respect.
73 Terry G4POP
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by K7PT »

Terry is spot on with his take on it.
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by OE6CLD »

Hi all,

Thanks for the updates and suggestions. I know that it will be close to impossible to determine CQZ and ITUZ from the US callsign. And I know this guy with the Hawaiian callsign living in Florida ;)

I only wanted to suggest, that if you manually enter a US State in the corresponding field in Log4OM, CQZ and ITUZ should be adopted accordingly (although that's not always 100% correct because some states are in 2 zones). But it will be correct for most of the states and for the others you can chose a default value with the largest probability.

Let's say I work W1AW/6. By default the state will be populated with CT (from QRZ.com), CQZ will be 5 and ITUZ will be 8. If I manually change the US State to CA (so that my WAS tracking will be correct) it would be great if CQZ automatically will be changed to 3 and ITUZ to 6.

That was all I suggested :)

73,
Claus, OE6CLD/EI7JZ
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by IW3HMH »

Hi Claus, yes we understand your intention, it's the same we have :)
State field can be used the way you suggest if we make it a drop down list, where i can bound fields and values to.

But state is received by external sources, and is used worldwide. Users can type whatever they want on it, upper and lowercasing, by abbreviation, by abbreviation - name, name and so on, so it's nearly impossible to have a reliable bound from this value to the referred CQ/ITU zones.

We're actively work on this part, and clublog is already providing an exception list, but without external sources, as said, this is a task that we cannot comply

73
Daniele
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by OE6CLD »

Hi Daniele,

Yes, I understand the problem. In Log4OM this field State/Prefecture is a free entry form and users can enter whatever they want. This only will work with a drop down (e.g. for US States and provinces in Canada). On the other side you already are generating the WAS Awards statistics and I think you are expecting the correct US State abbreviations (AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, ..., WY) or this would not work. I don't know if parsing the input string would be a good option, so forget this for now.

This only will work if there is some kind of database behind it (editable and expandable by the user). This also would allow to add some more awards based on states, provinces, prefectures, ... (hint !!!) ;) like Worked All Canada, Worked All Italian Provinces, ...

Maybe something for Log4OM v2.x.

Thanks again,
Claus, OE6CLD/EI7JZ
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by IW3HMH »

There will be something like this in the new release, but not binded to the state field.
WAS is made filtering USA DXCC and trying to identify the state reported in the state field is not simple.
Maybe in a future release i will create state as drop-down using list of provinces, states, counties and oblasts... but i should think about how to make it working efficiently.
Adding parsing is easy, keeping user interface responsive while i'm parsing dozens of fields concurrently is the hard task :)

73
Daniele IW3HMH
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Re: CQ And ITU Zone Matching the US State

Post by G3ZSS »

If you are looking for a list of W1AW portable stations then one can download this file from the ARRL website http://www.arrl.org/files/file/On%20the ... 4_sked.pdf. It tells you the week in which each State will be active.
73 Peter G3ZSS
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