Nearly all of my Chasing is done from my mobile station. I keep a paper logbook in the car, and transcribe it occasionally for upload. I fell way behind in transcribing this Fall. Recently I took a long road trip, and somehow on the way home, my log fell out of the car (I believe at a freeway rest stop in Oregon, when I stopped to let my pup do his business). So, I now have no record of my QSO’s from approximately September 1st through December 3rd, including SOTA as well as a lot of DX chasing.
It was a wonderful road trip but I sure am disappointed to lose all those contacts!
Is there any way to scour the database to see who logged me? I know I can manually go in and check some of my more commonly chased activators and recover some. But if there was some way to run a query on the database it would sure make it easier.
The good news is that I didn’t lose my Activator logbook, which was in the backpack, and I’m close to getting those all input and will upload them soon. My dog Snowball and I had a great time visiting summits in Utah, Idaho, Washington, British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Nevada.
2025 New Years Resolution, upload more often!
73 de Keith KR7RK
It’s possible for MT members with direct access to the DB to find out everyone who has logged you as a chaser. I’d do it but not today and then I am away for a quick SOTA expedition over the weekend. PM me on Tuesday to remind me and I’ll see what there is.
Keith, I can’t help with the log recovery. But I can recommend simultaneously logging and uploading chaser contacts via the “log spot” button which is present by each spot on Sotawatch when you are logged in.
I also chase from the mobile sometimes. I jot down the call sign worked and the time on a note pad – I can do this without looking down and usually still read my scribbling. When I return home or if I have opportunity to use the phone when parked, I log and upload the contact via Sotawatch. The Filter options work well for searching spots up to a week old for the call sign worked.
I use this as my primary means of logging chaser Qs. Every couple months I download the CSV of my chaser log, convert it to ADIF and import into DXKeeper on the shack PC. (One minor downside to this is that S2S contacts, being also chaser contacts, end up in my home/mobile chaser log. I wish there were an easy way to filter them out of the downloaded CSV.)
I hope Andy is able to sort out that problem for you and that you can rebuild your missing log successfully. Sounds feasible to me.
To try to avoid that kind of accidental loss, I use Vk portalog as my activator log on a Samsung tablet. I use the same software on another tablet as my chaser log. This software automatically saves all contacts in csv and adif format in separate folders for each day. I backup the logs to Dropbox but into different folders to separate (uncomplicate) those days when I chase and activate. When you chase from a summit or park, beach or lake, whatever activity you’re doing, the ADIF produced automatically changes the format of those log lines. No action required other than setting the logging software correctly before recording the contact.
No downloads from the database are used and no reformatting or re-sorting is needed. ADIF files can contain multiple activations for each day, so no reprocessing to separate chaser, activator and s2s contacts is needed. They can be uploaded to SOTA data on summit, in the car or at home, from the tablet, from Dropbox or from the home computer. If they need corrections I prefer to make the corrections at the tablet level using the original software and then follow the normal process which dropsync can do automatically. That way all the file copies are correct. Use a cable to copy files to the computer or use Dropbox. A cheap onetime upgrade to Dropbox licence permits periodic automated copies to be made. I only use “forward” syncing so i never have files on the tablet or on Dropbox being overwritten by files on the home computer.
This process has taken 11 years and about 600 activations to evolve. So far it is working fine. My pile of old earlier log notebooks is somewhere in the shack, unused. Including the ones where i operated in rain and the wet logbook was almost impossible to decipher. Amazing how transparent ballpoint ink can become on wet paper.
I know this kind of method does not suit everyone but I put it out there in case others may find it useful. Operating systems on tablets may differ from what individuals are used to, but then, there was a time when they couldn’t tune in ssb or copy cw. And believe it or not there was a time when we had no Digi modes. So we all can learn new tricks.
