Signal reports under comments

Hi all.

Made some field tests with Polo this week for SOTA- and POTA activations and was satisfied with the onsite experience.

Just seen then at home that the software writes down the signal exchange to the comments that are transferred then to the SOTA and displayed with the QSOs in question.

I am not used to have this in the SOTA- and POTA Log details and kindly ask to make that toggleable. I suggest to have an additional switch in the settings to turn on/off that the signal reports are written to the ADIF log.

Additionally, there are maybe other elements that could be added to the comments of each QSO by own toggles like e.g. the name of the counterparty operator or their P2P reference(s) or their S2S reference. That makes it easier to follow counterparties to their references and to follow there their experience.

Thanks in advance.

Vy 73, Markus

Markus,
You can customise the comments and notes as you wish with the export templates.

Alan

1 Like

Thanks, Alan

I had based on the Polo Manual PDF and not found there the template system explained.

Where can I find the manual for Polo templates with all possibilities and hopefully use case descriptions?

I had read that templates exist and had seen them mentioned in the app, but nothing more, since I had no hooks there how they would provide a better life for me, hi.

Thanks for guiding.

Vy 73, Markus

Markus,
I am unsure where you get a PDF version of the manual. The source of which should be the online version here.

That said, documentation for an application which is under heavy development like PoLo is always lagging well behind the changes being implemented.
The export settings provides some examples of available field values. At the moment you need to experiment a bit to get what you want.
Of course you can always open the source code in Git to get more information.


Alan

Hi Alan

Thanks for your time. Hoping here that I’m settled after some starter questions.

My PDF was the Ham2K Portable Logger version, but the one of March 23. I’ve just tried again, since this was 3 weeks ago. Looked up “template” but only found 1 reference to something else.

But your snippet from “Export Settings” was helpful. I had to print first the full set of variables and some basic examples for each from the “Export Settings” section, to have the syntax visible for me to alter the “ADIF QSO Comments” on the same device.

Now on experimenting! I’ve tried two things to alter the default setting for the “ADIF QSO Comments” line:

  • One was to append {{qso.their.refs}} after the reports, to export also the partner reference resp. references. That failed, it doesn’t run. I had QSOs with partner SOTA summits and partner POTA parks, even a 2-fer, but nothing is displayed in these cases.
  • A second try was to clear the field content to have NOTHING on this line, i.e. no signal reports and no display of possible notes. That failed, too. I could not empty that line. Delete the variables didn’t help. Entering 1 blank (space) didn’t help, either. I had to enter 1 real sign like “.”, then only the “.” was displayed, but that was not what I wanted.

So, how do I delete correctly the variables from the “ADIF QSO Comments” line to have the signal reports away and replaced by nothing? How do I display all available partner references?

I am – probably like many users – not used or not professional enough to study/research code details at Github or other developer places. So I am always happy to have a comprehensive type of manual to alter such coding details. Or a hands-on explanation here in the user forum. Thanks for your support.

Vy 73, Markus

Markus,
There may well be a bug in the current version.
This goes to my points about breaking things and documentation lagging implementation.
I’m sure it will be attended to shortly.
Alan

Thanks, Alan, this is normal. Probably I am the first one to have checked out this variable.

I would estimate a possibility to leavy a template line empty and to be sure then that the software does NOT take the “s… r…” default because the box is empty. :wink:

Thanks for your support, Alan.

Vy 73, Markus

These signal report comments were a feature originally requested by SOTA activators, since their site does not preserve signal reports.

Like Alan said, we added full customization of templates for each different activity to let you better suit your needs.

The April release is coming in a day or two and fixes a few of the bugs you mentioned.

Thanks, Alan and Sebastian - no hurry, but thanks for your open ears also in such minor details.

It certainly is okay to bring the signal reports for those requesting it, but consider that there are also others feeding the activations to a central log at home and therefore don’t need them. Btw, having had the signal reports now 3 times in the log, I must admit that this also has some advantages. :slight_smile:

Vy 73, Markus