Alabama QSO Party County Identifiers
A few weekends ago I finally managed to get a decent HF station set up. I decided to fire up the rig and see what was going on in the bands. It did not take long to hear several folks from Alabama calling CQ for their annual QSO Party.
I downloaded N1MM and took the opportunity to see if it knew about the Alabama QSO Party. It did so I proceeded to make some contacts. I noticed several folks were using four letter abbreviations for the counties. Most QSO Parties I have worked use three letters, but N1MM was using the four letter abbreviations so all was good.
At some point I made contact with a fellow who gave out a three letter abbreviation. Weird I thought. So I went to the Alabama QSO Party web site and looked up the abbreviations page…
…and they had both three letter and four letter abbreviations for each county. Apparently they switched to four letters not long ago and accept both during a transition time.
I can think of nothing more annoying to the many makers of amateur radio contest software than a county list that is not fixed. N1MM apparently has ignored the three letter abbreviations and have adopted the four characters.
Here is some advice to the sponsors of the Alabama QSO Party… Pick three OR four letter abbreviations never ever both. This is not the kind of thing where transition overlap makes any sense. I understand when you say…
“Some logging programs may still make use of the 3-letter abbreviation”
…, but this only causes confusion when operating. Programs that cannot comply with rule changes simply don’t work anymore. Plenty of program so keep up just fine so there should always be a few choices with the correct abbreviation lists.
This highlights another important facet of organizing QSO Parties… if you keep messing with your rules, software authors will eventually get tired of tracking your changes and dump you.
I did enjoy the Alabama QSO Party and hope to participate again next year with either the 3 OR 4 letter abbreviations… not both.
I am thankful for any organization who sponsors QSO Parties.
73
If software is what holds back rule changes in a qso party then we have a problem. Either the software author should spend the time to code in such a why that things like valid exchange lists, points, modes are dynamically configurable or they should be prepared to make changes. Software, by its very nature, should be configurable. Yes they won’t get it exact the first time, but a little forethought will go a long way to making a software program better. Then the software author can concentrate on fixing bugs rather than fixing configuration.
This is my anti-hardcoding rant #2738.
Perhaps, but the point above is AL rules are too loose if they support both 3 and 4 letter abbreviations.