{"id":40,"date":"2009-07-12T14:40:20","date_gmt":"2009-07-12T18:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cqwpx.com\/blog\/?p=40"},"modified":"2021-06-28T16:08:47","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T20:08:47","slug":"dancing-with-the-robot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/dancing-with-the-robot\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing with the Robot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone who submits an electronic log for the WPX Contest must eventually ‘dance with the robot.’\u00a0 That’s where you\u00a0email your log to ssb@cqwpx.com<\/a> or cw@cqwpx.com<\/a>.\u00a0 The robot happily receives your log, checks it for key information, and then replies with a confirmation.\u00a0 Or, in some cases, it replies with a rejection and begins your dance. You resubmit your log with corrections and the process is repeated.<\/p>\n

We try\u00a0very hard to make the robot response messages as simple and clear as possible.\u00a0 99% of you do read them and resubmit your log with the incomplete items corrected.\u00a0 For those who don’t, K1AR and I keep an eye on the robot inbox and rescue these logs (or email you for the missing info).\u00a0 Its a great system and we owe N5KO a great deal of appreciation for setting it up (for all CQ and ARRL contests)!<\/p>\n

As we near conclusion of another year of WPX SSB\/CW log submissions, I want to report on two changes we made to the robot for the WPX this year and how they have helped save time and prevent errors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first change was to add new checking on the LOCATION field for USA\/Canada entries. Since the contest reports results and issues certificates based on call areas, we need a way to know what call area you were actually operating from.\u00a0 The mailing address doesn’t always tell the story!\u00a0 The robot checks any USA\/Canada entry and makes sure it has a valid ARRL Section or State\/Province in the LOCATION field (see http:\/\/www.cqwpx.com\/locations.htm<\/a>\u00a0for the list of allowed values).\u00a0 This enables the log checking software to set the call area your score is reported in.\u00a0 You are responsible for entering this correctly!<\/em><\/p>\n

The second change was to add checking on club names.\u00a0 The robot looks at the text in the CLUB field and checks it for an exact match<\/strong> against a list of known clubs (see http:\/\/www.cqwpx.com\/clubnames.htm<\/a>\u00a0for the list).\u00a0 This list is maintained by F6BEE (f6bee@cqwpx.com<\/a>) and is shared by the CQ WW and WPX Contests.\u00a0 If your club name doesn’t match what is on the list, a warning message is included in the robot response message.\u00a0THE LOG IS STILL ACCEPTED so there is no need to panic if your club isn’t on the list.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why is this a big deal?\u00a0 When I started as Director last year, I\u00a0blogged about the club name problem<\/a> and my amazement at the number of different club spellings and abbreviations that were in use.\u00a0I probably spent 60-80 hours just sorting out club names and compiling the club scores. Due to language issues, there were many cases where it was impossible to match the club names with the abbreviations.\u00a0 This issue has practially disappeared\u00a0from the logs this year.<\/p>\n

Thanks for dancing with the robot and submitting a Cabrillo log that includes all of the information we need to process your log.\u00a0 This simple act by each of you saves us many\u00a0hours over the course of log checking and producing the results.\u00a0 Since everything is highly automated, the better the input information, the less chance for errors to creep into the results.<\/p>\n

As of today, we have received 4,084 logs for WPX SSB and 3,551 for WPX CW.\u00a0 Both are new records!\u00a0 Thanks again to each of you for participating and submitting your logs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone who submits an electronic log for the WPX Contest must eventually ‘dance with the robot.’\u00a0 That’s where you\u00a0email your log to ssb@cqwpx.com or cw@cqwpx.com.\u00a0 The robot happily receives your log, checks it for key information, and then replies with a confirmation.\u00a0 Or, in some cases, it replies with a rejection and begins your dance. … Continue reading Dancing with the Robot<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","no-featured-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7uaXG-E","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cqwpx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}