N1MM writes a line under its entry window with the beam heading, the heading the
long way round, the distance and the sun times at the other end. This writes the
same line.
SunTimes is the published sunrise equation, with the usual -0.833 degrees for
the sun's radius and refraction at the horizon, and it returns nothing on the
days inside the polar circles when the sun does not rise or set. It agrees with
published times for London at both solstices, Sydney in June and the equator at
the equinox, to within three minutes.
StationPath picks the position: the grid square when the contest exchanges one
and it has been copied, then the call history file, then the country file, which
puts the station in the middle of its country. That is close enough to point a
beam with. Our own end comes from the station grid square, or from the country
file for our own call.
One thing to know when reading the times: they are that station's own sunrise
and sunset in UTC, so for Japan the sun rises late the evening before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The packet window showed traffic and took a command line, and everything else
about the cluster lived in a dialog under Config. It is now the window N1MM has,
with the same five tabs.
Telnet shows the traffic with spot lines in green, what went out in blue and
lines from a preferred spotter in bold. Double clicking a spot line, or "Jump to
this spot", puts the radio there with the call in the entry window. Scrolling
stops while the pointer is over the traffic. The client keeps the last two
hundred lines, so a window opened mid-contest is not blank.
Clusters keeps the operator's nodes with their ports, passwords and after-login
commands, connects and disconnects, and holds the logon settings. Download
fetches the published list of telnet nodes from NG3K — around fifty, with the
sysop's call and a note about each — and clicking one fills the boxes in. N1MM
downloads its list from its own web service, which asks the operator to opt in
to data collection and is N1MM's to run, so this reads a public page instead.
ClusterList takes any page with telnet:// links in a table; a page it cannot
read leaves the stored list alone.
Filters decide which spots reach the bandmap: bands, modes, beacons, busted
calls, stations outside the call history file, blacklisted spotters and calls,
spots from outside your country, continent or a list of prefixes, and how long a
spot stays on the map. A busted spot is a call the callsign database has never
heard that is one character away from one it knows; a call nothing resembles is
kept, because that is what a new station looks like. Nothing is filtered out of
the traffic itself — the operator sees everything the node sends.
Buttons edits the twelve command buttons. A button takes what N1MM's takes: the
message macros, several commands separated by semicolons, or {CONN} and the name
of a favourite, which connects to that node instead of sending anything. The
label takes the macros too. Right-clicking a button opens the editor.
Config ▸ Cluster now opens this window on the Clusters tab rather than a dialog
of its own, which is where N1MM keeps those settings.
Three things that could take the program down while a cluster was connected:
Settings.Load read a null where the property is not nullable. A file that names
a key with a null value — one written before the property existed and then
edited — put that null straight through, because the property's own default only
runs when the key is missing. Opening the telnet window then threw on the first
list it touched. Every null is now put back to the default the property
declares, walking into the stored records and the lists of them.
Bandmap was written from the cluster's thread and read from the window's, so a
dictionary could be modified while a window enumerated it. Every method locks
now.
ClusterClient disposed its token source while its own loop still used it, and
the retry delay sat outside the catch, so a disconnect faulted the loop task.
Along the way the message macros were checked against N1MM's function-key
documentation, and several were wrong. {LOGGEDCALL} is N1MM's {LASTCALL}, the
serial is #, and there is no {MYZONE}; {NAME} and {GRIDSQUARE} stand for the
other station's name and grid, not ours; {OTHERMHZ} is the radio the operator is
not on. The single-character macros * and ! were missing. Added from the same
table: {LASTCALL}, {PREVNR}, {NAMEANDSPACE}, {CHNAME}, {GRID}, the two grid
bearings and the grid distance, {FREQ}, {FREQROUND}, the other-radio
frequencies, {TIMESTAMP} and {TIME2}. Frequencies are formatted the way N1MM
formats them, with R for the decimal point on CW. The macros that pass a station
to the other band take the second radio as a new argument, and stand for nothing
at a one-radio station.
Left out, and written down: saving spots to a database, which N1MM keeps in its
admin database rather than in the log file the two programs share; the
special-calls list; the two-character busted check, which is a few hundred
thousand lookups per spot against a few hundred for one character; and N1MM's
action macros, which need a different shape than an expander that returns a
string.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
WAE is two contests in one. The QSOs are scored like any other, except that a
multiplier is worth four on 80 metres, three on 40 and two on the high bands, so
Multiplier grew a weight and ScoreTally sums weights rather than counting.
Europe works the rest of the world and the rest of the world works Europe; on
RTTY that rule is dropped and everybody works everybody.
The other half is QTC traffic: one station reads back contacts it has already
made, ten to a series, and every line is a point for both stations. Those lines
live in the log as rows of their own, exactly where N1MM puts them — Exchange1
says SQTC or RQTC, the reported contact's time, call and number go in the sent
report, received report and sent number columns, and the series in misc text.
So a log written by either program opens in the other with its traffic intact.
A QTC row is not a worked station: Contest.IsContact says so, and ContestLog
keeps such rows out of the dupe index and the multiplier index while still
counting their points. Cabrillo writes them as QTC: records.
Checked against eight real WAE logs rather than against my own reading of the
rules. Points agree with N1MM on all eight, to the contact. Weighted
multipliers agree on the six logs from 2022 on; the two older ones differ only
where the country file has since changed its mind, and in one place on purpose:
N1MM counts a callsign it cannot place as a multiplier with an empty value.
That comparison turned up two bugs of ours. A KG4 call is Guantanamo Bay only
when it is three or five characters long — KG4NE is, KG4IGC is an ordinary US
call — and the country file cannot say so, so every program that reads it
carries the rule. And Callsign is a record holding a list of modifiers, so the
generated equality compared that list by reference and two parses of one call
came out different.
Entering QTCs while operating is not there yet; the window is next.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Behind the bandmap scale, the CW part of the band is one shade and the phone
part another, with a third for a digital block. That is what N1MM's graphical
bandmap does: ResizeBandPanels puts a CW, a Digi and an SSB panel behind the
scale, sized from its CWBands, DigiBands and SSBBands tables. Anything past a
band edge is shaded red, which is the only place the edges themselves show, and
it only appears now that the slice can reach past an edge.
The defaults are N1MM's: CW ends at 1840, 3600, 7125, 14150 and so on, and the
digital pair is empty until somebody fills it in, exactly as N1MM ships. They
are one worldwide set rather than one per ITU region, which is also N1MM's
answer — the reason recorded for leaving this out, that the segments differ by
region, was wrong about what N1MM holds. 60M and everything above 2M get no
entry, because N1MM's own numbers there contradict themselves: its 1.25M CW top
is below its phone start, and its 70CM CW top is above the band.
Config ▸ Sub bands edits them, one row per band in kilohertz, with a Defaults
button. Only the rows that differ are written to the settings file, so a plan
nobody has touched leaves nothing behind. BandPlan is an object rather than a
static table, so the stored changes layer over the defaults and the bandmap
picks up a save without a restart.
The numbers are a drawing aid, not a licence. Nothing stops a contact being
logged either side of a boundary.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Contest operating goes outside the band edges. Someone answers a CQ at 14352, or
a radio reports a frequency a few hundred hertz off, and Bands.ForFrequency
returned null: the contact scored nothing, missed the per-band dupe check and
exported with no band.
N1MM buckets a frequency by its whole megahertz — its BandFor divides the
kilohertz by 1000 and switches on the result, with 1 and 2 both 160M, 3 and 4
both 80M, 28 and 29 both 10M — and never looks at a band edge. Same rule here,
except that the real edges are checked first: 2190M and 630M are both under
1 MHz and share the bucket, so nothing else can tell them apart. A frequency
under 1 MHz that misses both edge ranges still has no band, as it does in N1MM.
The bandmap clamped its slice to the band edges, so a radio past the edge left
the receiver bar off the top of the scale. The slice now stretches to wherever
the radio is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
N1MM's format, so a file published for a contest is read as it is: # comments,
!!Order!! naming the columns of the lines after it, semicolons in preference to
commas so user text can hold a comma, and a default column order for a file
that names none. The directives that change what is stored are acted on;
!!Order!! can appear again part way through, because these files are usually
several files stuck together.
Leaving the callsign box fills what the file knows into the exchange boxes that
are still empty. A box with something in it is left alone: what the station
actually sends beats what somebody published months ago. The zone comes from
the CqZone or the ITUZone column depending on which the contest asks for, and a
file with no Sect falls back to State.
The check window's two missing columns are in. History lists matching calls
from the file. Exchange is not about callsigns at all: it offers the values the
exchange box with the cursor in it can hold, which is what N1MM's exchange pane
does — it searches the contest's list of valid exchanges, not the log.
CheckCandidate.Call is now Text, because an exchange value is not a call.
The section-validating directives are read and passed over rather than acted
on. Acting on them means holding N1MM's section lists and its rules about
retired sections, and getting that wrong throws away good data.
Running it caught what the unit tests could not: the exchange was filled and
scored but the boxes on screen still looked empty, because nothing resynced
them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Double-click a cell in the log window to change it. The columns follow the
contest exchange instead of being fixed in the XAML, so CQ WW gets a Zone
column and Sweepstakes gets Nr, Prec, Ck and Sec.
QsoEditor holds the column list and applies one field edit. Validation comes
from the ExchangeFieldKind the contest declared: a CQ zone is 1 to 40, an ITU
zone 1 to 90, a section is looked up in the ARRL list, a grid must parse.
A refused edit returns the reason and leaves the log alone, so the cell
reverts. Changing the callsign runs the country lookup again.
Delete, or the right-click menu, removes the selected contact after a
confirmation. Either way the log is rescored, so a multiplier the removed
contact held passes to the next contact that claims it.
Both go out to the other stations in N1MM's own messages: contactreplace
carries oldcall and oldtimestamp, contactdelete names the contact. An incoming
edit or delete is matched by contact id first, falling back to call plus
timestamp because N1MM does not know our ids.
Country, continent and the two prefixes were filled in twice, once when
logging and once when editing. They now come from CountryFields.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Frequencies, bands, modes, callsigns, grid squares and the country file live in
Nonemm.Core. Nonemm.Contests holds the scoring engine and CQ WW and CQ WPX.
Nonemm.Storage writes N1MM's DXLOG schema, and Nonemm.Formats writes Cabrillo
3.0 and reads and writes ADIF.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
