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RAC Contests Log
This year was my first time participating in the RAC Canada Day contest on my own. It was a lot of fun and also very instructive. Here are a few things I learned.
First, everything you need to know about the RAC contests (either the Canada Day or the Winter Day) is located on the RAC website.
Logs
At the end of the contest, logs must be submitted to RAC. They will accept paper logs for submissions with less than 100 entries, but they really prefer electronic logs, which must be formatted as Cabrillo.
A Cabrillo file is really just plain text file formatted in a very specific way. For more information, see:
- This RAC pdf, or
- The WWROF website
For example, here's a copy of my Cabrillo file (with only a few entries as example):
The first 21 lines give RAC all the information they need about the operator. The other lines show the contacts made, ending with an END-OF-LOG
tag.
RAC does NOT want this emailed to them in the body of the email. Instead, this should be saved in a plain text file named (in my case): VA7FI.LOG and attached to the email.
Regular contesters use logging programs which can generate these files while providing many bells and whistles during the contest to facilitate the logging process. Many people have recommended N1MM. RAC also has its own Microsoft Windows contest program.
But since I'm not a regular contester and I didn't have time to familiarize myself with a logging program that would run under GNU/Linux, I simply used a spreadsheet to log my entries and tweaked it as the day went on to add my points and check for duplicate stations. A few days after the contest was over, I cleaned up the spreadsheet and added some code to export the Cabrillo file the way RAC needs it.
Here are a few introductory videos I made to explain how to use the spreadsheet, which should also work with the RAC Winter Contest in December.
The first video shows where to download LibreOffice, and how to set the Security settings to allow LibreOffice to run macros: Tools
→ Options...
→ LibreOffice
→ Security
→ Macro Security
→ Medium
Here is the link to download it.
I've licensed it under a Creative Commons By-Sa so you are free to:
- Run the scripts for any purpose.
- Study and modify the scripts.
- Copy the scripts to help others.
- Improve the scripts, and release the improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Provided that you:
- Attribute the work to me by linking to <https://ptruchon.pagekite.me>
- Distribute any derivative work under the same license.
Here's a copy of the code that generates the Cabrillo file: