Sunday, September 28, 2008

My Ham Radio Logging Setup

OK, so most of my blog readers are people that come here that I make contact with on the radio. They look up my call sign on www.qrz.com and see the link to come here. This is a breakdown of my logging setup here. Computer is a old Pentium 2 - 400MHZ with 384MB RAM and a 20GB HD. Not much of a computer by today's standards but enough to log my contacts and soon serve as the digital nerve center for all my digital mode transmission including but not limited to RTTY (Radio teletype). The digital stuff is coming in a few months... check out www.tigertronics.com Signal Link USB... OH YEAH! OK, back on track here. The logging software I use is Amateur Contact Log 3.0 from Scott - N3FJP. I highly recommend it. Check out all his software (I own it all) at www.n3fjp.com Great program, the best for the the money. This log program does it all and is simple to use. Every other log program I have tried has way to small print to read and way to complicated to mess with. Scott has it right with this one. A lot of people use his software worldwide and I can see why. Anyway, so that's the program I prefer. I also subscribe to qrz.com's XML data service which links with the log program to look up all the details instantaneously (such as state, county, grid square, blah blah blah) for $29 a year. The cost of the $29 for a year subscription far outweighs going through and manually putting in all the details. You can download the data from the FCC and convert it yourself, but it will not contain grid squares and counties, or data from different countries. The nice thing about the log is that it has a feature to automatically interface with LOTW (Logbook of the World) www.arrl.org/lotw Logbook of the world is great because every contact confirmed there is equal to using a paper QSL card. Old school operators don't usually like LOTW because it is difficult to install and they think it is the same as EQSL which in my opinion is garbage and means nothing. I have about a 10 percent QSL rate with LOTW and I am currently working on my basic WAS (Worked All States) through LOTW only. So there you have it. That's my logging setup here. Either you are asleep by now, or you found this informative.

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