[Dxbase] Entries

Sat Feb 20 10:16:57 EST 2010

After using DXBase all these many years, I knew that there was an issue that
affected my logging that was my fault but still created a problem. As I was
operating I would type in the call of a station and hit tab to complete the
entry. If I found out that I had miscopied or mistyped the call I would put
the cursor in the call area and correct the call. This is fine except it
leaves all the rest of the information incorrect, including the country, and
zones. (I know, I know, I should hit the ESC key and reenter but if you're
in a hurry this takes time and I am absent minded. I had caught myself doing
this from time to time and wondered in the back of my mind, how often this
problem had occurred. Given the fact that I had 60K+ QSOs there was no real
convenient way to figure it out. 
Yesterday, while perusing my "Daily DX" issue I noticed that Bernie
mentioned a cool website called "Club Log":
http://www.clublog.org/index.php
I decided to upload my log to this site and see what it had to offer. It is
real interesting and seems like something that should be done with LOTW!
In any case after uploading the file I got back a potential error file from
the site, identifying the possible errors between callsigns and country. I
was horrified to find out there were a lot! Apparently the site is smart and
identifies particular stations for particular countries. I found a small
number of calls that 'I' had specifically identified incorrectly. I double
checked against QRZ.COM and found they had done an excellent job of
identifying callsigns.
I was thinking that something like this would sure be an asset to DXBase.
Maybe DXBase could log onto a website and the program could error check your
log to ferret out errors and identify ones that aren't obvious like TO3X.
(For example I had R1ANF identified as VP8 in some cases and KC4 in others.)
I guess that my purpose in sending this message is to say that it would be
nice to have DXBase identify the country/zones based on current call in the
callsign in the call area and not the "first" call that was inputted. I
realize that this would require a different type of programming (and I know
nothing about how this is done).
I am currently going through my log and correcting the errors. A lot of
errors can creep into a log in 30 years. I wonder if it is going to have any
impact on my band/country totals.