I have a problem .. with logging.

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The first step in solving any problem is recognising that there is one. In my case the name of that problem is "logging". Specifically the storage and collection of my amateur radio contact logs.

Just to be clear, the actual process of logging is fraught .. what do you log, as in, which pieces of information are germane to the purpose of logging, do you log your own callsign, or do you only collect that once per session, do you log in UTC, or in local time, if you're logging in local time, do you record where you're logging, do you record what power level, which antenna, what radio, the battery voltage, you get the idea.

Then there's .. when do you log? Do you log each and every session on-air, weekly nets, chat sessions on the local repeater, do you log the time when you establish the contact, once you've deciphered their callsign, or once the contact ends, and if you never wear a watch, how do you know what time it is?

What do you log with? Is it using pen and paper, pencil and paper, on a sheet of A4, or A5, in a binder, in a scrapbook, in an exercise book, in a journal, a diary, on ruled, grid or on plain paper, or do you log with a computer and if you do that, using which of the seven gazillion logging packages that are available to you?

I'm not talking about any of those things, though I suppose you could argue that I'm addressing one of the gazillion options, but stick with me.

I have, sitting on my desk, fourteen different logbooks. That's not unreasonable, almost one for each year that I've been licensed. Except that these books are not in any way consistent, they're essentially bound pieces of scrap paper with log entries scribbled in the available space, sometimes I've reversed a spiral notebook, just so I can avoid the spiral with my writing hand, sometimes it's oriented in landscape, other times in portrait. Some are smaller than A5, others are foolscap and intended for accounting purposes.

Next to that pile are too many empty logbooks, intended for future use. Why so many, you ask? Well it goes like this. You go to the office supply store to look for a suitable logbook. You buy it and try it. You use it for a bit and decide that you either love or hate it. If you hate it, you go back to the store to try and find another one. If you love it, your problem becomes finding an identical logbook. In a fit of inspiration, I loved the grid layout of my tiny spiral notebooks, and decided that this was the one for me, but they're no longer available, so instead I bought twenty A4 7mm grid exercise books with a soft cover, which I hate, and that was after trying to get a third Account Book Journal with a hard cover. There's also several A5 spiral bound books, but they're too chunky for portable operation and their spiral is annoying for logging.

There's also various empty ring binders and paper ready for logging in the garage. Who knew that there are apparently multiple disconnected universes where so-called universal loose-leaf hole punched paper doesn't fit ring binders with more than two rings, I suppose that's like different implementations of the same version of ADIF, but I'll admit that I'm bitter and have digressed well off topic. I will say this, stationery and I clearly have an unhealed relationship.

That's not the half of it.

My computer has at least 208 ADIF and Cabrillo files on it. I say "at least", since that's the ones I found when looking for ADI, ADIF and CAB files. Removing identical files, nets me 171 text files which I'm pretty sure are all log files, 50-thousand lines, but that's with some having a one line per contact and others having a dozen, depending on which software wrote the file.

It's going to take a moment, since those 208 files are scattered among 74 different directories. Then there's the files that "wsjt-x" and "fldigi" create, but right now I'm not sure what the extensions for those are, I think one is called "all.txt", and looking inside, it helpfully does not have a year in the logged data, so that's fun. My computer also has logs in "cqrlog", "xlog" and "VKCL", probably others.

Then there's the logs I have online. The log for F-troop is a single spreadsheet, it has nearly 10,000 entries. I know that there's other files online and likely in other places like the various clubs I've operated at .. fortunately or not, most of those were done with the club callsign, so I'm calling those out of scope, at least for now.

Then there's the entries in LoTW, Clublog, eQSL, probably QRZ and likely more.

It all started out so innocently. I made my first contact in 2011 and forgot to log it. Since then I've been extolling the virtues of making sure that everyone around me logs their first contact.

Meanwhile I've been pulling my hair out trying to make sense of the fragmented disaster that is represented by logging in amateur radio. I'll take responsibility for my own mess, but I have to point the finger at my predecessors who still cannot agree on what to log, how to log and how to store or convert it, despite a century of logging.

It's not for the want of trying. It's that the nature of logging in this hobby is less than consistent, to say the least. Each contest wants their log in some special format, logging tools pick their own format that's incompatible with that of another tool, if you're lucky that incompatibility is obvious, but more likely than not it's subtle.

Among all those sources of log entries that I've mentioned are undoubtedly going to be duplicate contacts. There's going to be incorrect transcriptions, inaccurate record keeping, wrong times, missing years and all the other things that come to mind when you describe a data entry problem.

Fortunately I have some experience with data entry.

It was the transcribing of a recent POTA, or Parks On The Air, log that triggered an insight for me. Faced with the reality of entering contacts into something electronic, based on a bound notebook with log entries scribbled all over it, basically a pretty piece of scrap paper, I needed to solve a specific problem. Namely, the fact that I was entering this data for another amateur, who would be uploading it into the relevant POTA system. I had no idea what the field requirements were, didn't know where they'd be uploaded to, nor what format they needed, so I improvised, figuring that getting both the logged and inferred data into some table would be a good start, so I used a spreadsheet.

After completing the task, I had my epiphany.

What if I logged ALL my contacts in a spreadsheet?

I can sort it by whichever column I want, I can have as many columns as I need, a squillion rows if I make that many contacts, I can convert it to whatever format the next contest manager desires and I can back it up like any other spreadsheet. Better still, it's software agnostic. If I suddenly discover the next best logging tool since toasted sliced bread with creamed honey, I can convert my sheet into something that's required. Better yet, I can extract the data from that tool and put it back into the spreadsheet after discovering the author has a propensity of making random changes that are incompatible with my worldview.

So, spreadsheet.

Oh, yeah, I won't be using Excel, it has a, let's call it, nasty habit of converting anything that remotely resembles a date into one, even when you don't want it to. Clippy lives on .. apparently.

I'll likely photograph each page and to keep track of which logs I've entered, I'll put a coloured dot on a page when I've entered it into my spreadsheet. Once a logbook is entered, I'll mark it in some way too. Then I'll have to massage the existing electronic data. I can't wait.

How have you solved your contact logging problem?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB