G'Day,

I was able to arrange a small period of time in this contest in September, attempting for the first time to send/receive QTCs.

In preparation for the contest I discovered a few problems.

I use N1MM for contesting, and transfer all the logs to LOGic for the detailed reports and analysis for my future efforts.

An examination of the QTC process in LOGic revealed a couple of fundamental flaws in the way LOGic treats QTCs, two simple to fix, the other requires rather more work.

For a valid QTC in WAE, one must share the material for a previous contest QSO with others, in batches of no more than 10 at a time, and no more than 10 with any single individual. In the contest, on air, if asked for QTCs and you agree, one has to send/speak a QTC of an earlier contest QSO that you made, sending ...

a batch sequence number you create
the number of QSOs you intend to send in the batch
... and for each QSO you report ...
the call you worked
the time you worked them
the serial number you received

... in LOGic, you record this material in user fields on each QSO as you report it in the batch of QTCs. To make life easy, one usually starts the QTC process with the first QSO you made in the contest working down the log using the browse window. The goal is to double your score by sending QTCs. The purpose seems to be to encourage one to have a rather longer conversation with others than a simple exchange of numbers.

Later, when you submit your Cabrillo log, the log needs to report the QTCs. You and the receiver of your QTCs, accumulate points for both your QSOs and the QTCs. In your log must be ...

A QSO with the person with whom you are exchanging the QTCs, followed by the QTCs which must contain ...

the radio frequency
the date of the QTC
the TIME of the QTC <-- Note this is missing in LOGic
the CALL with whom you exchanged the batch of QTCs
the batch sequence number you gave
the number of QSOs in the batch
the call you worked in the QSO
the time you worked them
the serial number you received

Here are a few lines from the N1MM Cabrillo output ...

QSO: 14281 PH 2014-09-13 0644 VK4IU         59  0023   DJ6QT         59  0104 
QSO: 14214 PH 2014-09-13 0652 VK4IU         59  0024   DF0HQ         59  0279 
QTC: 14214 PH 2014-09-13 0652 DF0HQ         3/4        VK4IU         0634 DJ7WW         0130
QTC: 14214 PH 2014-09-13 0652 DF0HQ         3/4        VK4IU         0637 YL2014S       0054
QTC: 14214 PH 2014-09-13 0653 DF0HQ         3/4        VK4IU         0641 DL0IL         0066
QTC: 14214 PH 2014-09-13 0653 DF0HQ         3/4        VK4IU         0644 DJ6QT         0104
QSO: 14266 PH 2014-09-13 0656 VK4IU         59  0025   EA7ATX        59  0030 

In LOGic 9, as provided, the Contest logform for WAE, does not have provision for recording the time of the QTC. This is easily corrected by adding a "user defined field" - WAE_QTCTIME - and adding it to the contest LOG form. There is also an error in the default scoring - it should be

1+IIF(EMPTY(TAG_VAL("WAE_QTCTO:", USERFIELDS, "I")),0,1)

After I made these changes, the score in LOGic matched the score given by N1MM.

Fixing the other problem - creating the Cabrillo output is another issue entirely.