[WT-support] VHF Wish List

Bernhard Buettner DL6RAI wintest at dl6rai.muc.de
Sun May 6 19:02:23 CEST 2007


Dear WT-Team:

I operated the May VHF contest semi-seriously this weekend from my home
with limited antennas and power, made 105 QSOs and scored ~30k points.
I enjoy the graphic display of stations worked and DX spots received
and I feel that WT works as smoothly on VHF as it does on the HF bands.
I used WT 3.10.1.

Knowing that both Olivier and Laurent are not really VHF contesters,
here are a few points on my wish list for the improvement of VHF 
operations with Win-Test:

a) Implement a transverter offset feature so that integrated radio
control can be used with this setup. Most of the big guns use a
transverter due to better usability of HF radios and improved front-end
of the transverter. They run their HF radio on 10 meters and use the
transverter to convert up and downlink to/from 144 MHz for example.

What's needed is a simple window that allows the operator to enter an
offset in kHz (like 116000.0) that is subtracted when a frequency is
written to the radio or added when a frequency is read from the radio.
So when you click on a packet spot on 144033, the radio is being
sent to 28033. And when you tune the dial to 28044, the band map is
updated with a frequency of 144044.

b) Allow a reverse look-up of stations by QTH locator. Enter a locator
(or part of it) in the locator field and have the check partial
window come up with a list of callsigns that match this locator
(or the partials of it).

c) Allow cross-mode contacts. Due to the weak signals found on VHF,
sometimes it is necessary to raise other station's attention by calling
and maybe completing the QSO on CW. So you end up with a cross-mode
QSO, where station A was on SSB and station B was on CW. I believe
WT did allow to modify the received (or sent) report (e.g. drop one
figure) - but at this time, WT will not accept the changed report as
it implies a different mode.

73 Ben, DL6RAI



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