[Dxbase] The ADIF report output of LoTW has been tweaked

Tue Jan 31 17:33:15 EST 2006

Greg,
I think the answer is yes. But interestingly, thanks for pointing out the 
link.
WARNING. According to the ARRL web link for LoTW, they intend to eliminate 
their use of their own ADIF field called APP_LoTW_OWNCALL. As some of you 
might remember, this field was created by the ARRL developers of the LoTW as 
a way of identifying the callsign of the station who made the QSO. Very 
important for those who have multiple callsigns. According to the recent 
note, the ARRL developers intend to eliminate this field in future LoTW 
outputs (in the very near future according to their note) and instead use a 
field called STATION_CALL. The fields seem to have an identical definition 
and there is no mention of why the ARRL developers are going to eliminate 
the APP_LoTW_OWNCALL field or for that matter even why they are making the 
change.
In any case, DXbase uses the APP_LoTW_OWNCALL field when importing an LoTW 
style ADIF file. At the time we implemented the use of this field, we were 
assured that it would not be changed in the future, but here we are! If the 
ARRL developers eliminate this field, your LoTW imports from ADIF will 
potentially not work correctly since the callsign of the station who made 
the QSO would no longer be read from the ARRL ADIF file. If this matters to 
you, then I urge you to notify the ARRL developers that they must maintain 
backward compatibility with the ADIF fields that have already been 
implemented in third-party software and leave this field in tact unchanged. 
If the ARRL developers go forward with their change, you would have to edit 
the ARRL ADIF file you download and perform a search/replace of STATION_CALL 
with APP_LoTW_OWNCALL before you use the ADIF file obtained from ARRL LoTW.
Regards,
Jack
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg" <n8tdl at earthlink.net>
To: "Dxbase (E-mail)" <dxbase at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 4:33 PM
Subject: [Dxbase] The ADIF report output of LoTW has been tweaked
> *Jan 31, 2006: ADIF output and FAQ changes* -- The ADIF report output of 
> LoTW has been tweaked to better conform to the current ADIF specification. 
> Details <http://www.arrl.org/lotw/developer/adifout.html#adiffields> are 
> in the LoTW developers area.
>> do i still use lotw adif in the import ?
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