Through 1200 points - thanks to Jimmy!

We’ve not had a lot to do today, what with Liam being too bad with asthma to go out, and workmen round doing some tiling etc (I am as good at DIY as I am with a soldering iron!).

So we’ve been mainly staying in, and Jimmy has been sat at his PC trawling through the Database, “just checking things” he said when I asked him what he was up to. Every so often, he came through to the shack to report something. One was an activator contact from 2005 I had entered as “G4GAH”, which should be G3GAH. Not wanting to disappoint the lad, and in admiration for his attention to detail, I deleted the activation, and prepared a CSV file with the correct details. I also deleted a recent activation that had a typo in the S2S reference I had put in the notes field, and added all those details to the CSV file. Get it all done at once I thought, and so I added my last two days of activations to that file ready for submission.

Jimmy came back through with a major issue. “The Database only shows you as 1199 points, and you’ve got 1201” he insisted. He was adamant he was right, and we have a saying in our house “Jimmy’s never wrong”! So my first reaction was to accept that I’d probably lost one or two activations somewhere, maybe when I did my ‘spring clean’ of my Database logs back in July.

I imported mine and Jimmy’s full activator logs into Excel. I filtered out all but the first contacts of each activation, and all non-scoring activations. I then set up a simple formula to give me the running points total after each activation. I looked for my Cadair Berwyn MG activation, and sure enough, the formula returned 998 points. So there were definitely two missing points before then.

I lined up all Jimmy’s activations with mine. They matched, so I got rid of those and concentrated my search on pre October 2005 (when Jimmy became licensed). We re-sorted all lines into SOTA reference order, and looked for missing uniques. (Jimmy can easily memorise our 195 uniques). GW/NW-069 wasn’t there, so that was one of them, and it had to have been the 2004 activation, as we only returned there in 2007.

However, there weren’t any more missing references. “So the other one has to be one we’ve done more than once” concluded Jimmy, “We have to check the number of times each one shows”. We looked down the list. Here “Memory Man” Jimmy came into his own: “Yes, that’s right, three times on Cleeve Hill before I was licensed: once when you went to Twickenham on your own, once when you went to Twickenham with me and once when you did it after a course for work in Birmingham”. And so he went on, unerringly recounting history, whether he was present on the activations or not!

So it was that it was identified that there was a Hail Storm Hill G/SP-009 activation recorded for 2003 and 2005, but not 2004. “Did we do that one in 2004?” I asked Jimmy. “Yes!” he replied, so we had found the other missing point.

I pulled down my old paper logbooks from the top shelf and entered all the QSOs for those two activations into the growing CSV file. It didn’t take too long, courtesy of the dark magic that is CTRL+C, CTRL+V!

Uploaded the CSV file, and there we go - 688 SOTA activations and 1201 activator points. I am lucky to have a Jimmy. Every OM should have one!

And it’s not just me who gets the benefit of his eagle-eye and unbeatable memory either. He’s been looking at other activators’ logs, and found several errors. Some of you might be getting an email from him soon…!

Tom M1EYP

In reply to M1EYP:

I hope that Jimmy can find me some more points too. Like you, I know better than to question his judgement!

73

Richard
G3CWI