February '25 - Pre 8

Yeah, I skipped a few announcements between Pre 1 and Pre 8. But most were just fixing bugs with the features already announced.

Pre 8 is not really an exception, but we’re getting close to what the final release will be.

  • Operation Templates, when starting a new operation.
  • Using any operation as a template to start a new one.
  • Belgian Lighthouses and Lightships (by M1SDH)
  • Belgium Castles and Fortresses (by M1SDH)
  • Better handling of QRZ.com lookup errors.
  • Text expansion for callsign notes (prepend with .. or //)

(this last feature won’t be of much use for most people, but, if you work the same group of people frequently, you can use a custom call notes file and this new expansion feature)

2 Likes

Can you explain this expansion feature please?
Alan

Say, you know you often work KM4QNA and W1WC (the Tenniswoods!) together, you can add a line on your notes file that reads

QNA KM4QNA,W1WC

And then when you hear Anna during your operation, you enter ..QNA (the . gets converted to / but it’s the same) and then press enter or send, and it gets replaced with KM4QNA,W1WC in the callsign field.

1 Like

Nice feature but I would have a different use case. For me I would want to put in the hunters first call sign that they give and then the system brings back all of their call signs and their name.

So in my text file I would propose the following:

VK1AO VK1AO,VK2MET Alan

And then I enter …VK1AO would it then put the two calls in the callsign field and display his name?

If I forgot to put the two dots in and just entered VK1AO, I presume it would display “VK1AO,VK2MET Alan” on the info line?

Correct. Right now I’m basically ~abusing~ leveraging the Call Notes files to store these, in order to avoid having to build a second separate set of UI elements to manage it.

But in theory, the kind of entries you want for expansion and the kind of entries you want for notes are not quite the same.

I’ll give these a go Marty

3PF ## VK3PF,VK3KAI
2VW ## VK2VW,VK2HFI,VK2AKA,VK2BUG
2IO ## VK2IO,VK2GEZ
4KC ## VK4KC,VK4MAD,VK4DOG,VK8DJ
2YAK ## VK2YAK,VK4YAK
2OKR ## VK2OKR,VK2AUS
3SQ ## VK3SQ,VK3BD
3AWA ## VK3AWA,VK3AWB,VK3AWC
2BM ## VK2TER,VK2QRP,VK2BM
4NH ## VK4NH,VK4DXA
2VAR ## VK2VAR,VK2GOM
1RF ## VK1RF,VK2MK,VK4CEE
2MOE ## VK2MOE,VK1MO
1AO ## VK1AO,VK2MET
2YK ## VK2YK,VK5GA
4MPB ## VK4MPB,VK4ETA,VK4GOD
4TI ## VK4TI,VK4EMP,VK4GKO

They are in my notes file
Alan

Excellent!
Looking forward to playing around with this feature.