thoughts on QSL cards printing/writing

Your ideas for making Log4OM even better.
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sp9wpn
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Posts: 30
Joined: 27 May 2019, 22:52

thoughts on QSL cards printing/writing

Post by sp9wpn »

Hello,

As I promised to Daniele, here are my few thoughts about the present paper QSL card handling features. I don't know how it's going to look like in V2, but maybe these ideas will be useful anyway.

1. First of all, I'd suggest to remove "QSL assistant" and make it a part of "Label printing" (perhaps under a new name). Why? Well, does hand-writing QSLs and printing differ a lot? All the selection, finding managers and status checking is done same for both options - only the final act differs. Currently "Label printing" as very mature and powerful. At the end just give user a choice to either print labels or present data for writing - showing the same information as for labels.

2. There are countries which do not have QSL bureaus (listed on IARU website). There are also countries which have many DXCC entities, but one bureau (like Russia or UK), so ADIF field "country" is not always good. A small online-updated database in Log4OM would allow proper QSL sorting (see par. below) already while printing (or writing) cards and give a red warning for non-bureau countries. Managers will be grateful.
This could be extended even for individual callsigns, eg. in Poland there's online list of callsigns which paid their membership and have access to the bureau. Perhaps other country managers would join here and provide data to save their work.


Now few minor things:
3. QSL Sorting. Sorting is a actually a problem in few Log4OM places, this is one of them. My QSL manager wants outbound cards to be sorted by country main bureau prefix (with special rules for USA). I believe that's what most managers want, either country name or bureau prefix. It can be done 90% even with present Log4OM, but needs some extra configuration to achieve. I think such sorting should be default and out-of-the-box.

4. Country main prefix could be added to "Country" field (see par. 2). Like: Country: Poland [SP]

5. Slashed zeros for callsigns (both printed and on-screen). Come on, this is as easy as selecting almost any monospaced font in Windows.

6. Lastly, idea of mine (probably against ADIF specs): "QSL sent" field could be allowed to be empty by default (instead of "N"). Then "N" will mark a QSO which I deliberately do not want to send card to (eg. operator asks for no card). Empty field would mean "unknown / undecided".


Keep the good work! :)

Wojtek
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