Tlf and the 2023 KS QSO Party

[Nate Bargmann]

Thanks to the hard work of everyone, my use of Tlf for this year's KS QP
was the smoothest yet.  The scoring module is bang on except for the
addition of 100 points for working KS0KS, but I don't think that is
something I ever mentioned for inclusion.

ESC to kill sending of Morse and voice files worked quite well.  There
were some instances of my only having a couple of letters typed in and
while transmitting a Morse message that hitting ESC wiped the call
field.  I don't really recall the exact circumstances but it may have
been the case where it was split second timing between the end of the
message and my hitting ESC.  This was much less annoying than losing an
entire exchange as before!

Because I use full break-in (QSK) in CW mode, I often need to end a
transmission before a message is completely sent when I hear the other
station begin transmitting.  I don't always remember what I've typed so
preserving the field contents is important to me.  As I recall, CT and
N1MM only use ESC to stop sending and use another key combination to
wipe the fields.  Now, this may be cumbersome to more proficient ops but
for a lot of us, the program should retain all entered information until
such time as the op deliberately wants to wipe the fields.  There are
too many times when out of frustration I whacked the ESC key multiple
times with other programs (one stop is good, four five stops being even
gooder, sort of thing), a habit I've had to unlearn with Tlf.  Perhaps I
need to revisit my configuration in light of recent development.

Tlf scored all mults and QSO points correctly for me this year.  I made
sure to use the new Python scoring module and it worked perfectly as
near as I could tell.  Right at the end I mistyped a county abbreviation
which Tlf accepted but my log processing script caught.  Perhaps the
scoring module should compare the entered string with the mults list in
the Python rules file.  It would still fail to catch an error such as MS
entered for MSH, or WA for WAS, for example.  For that we probably need
AI (Applied Instruction).

The sound recorder worked perfectly, except for when I forgot to start
it yesterday morning and didn't record the first two hours of the event.
D'oh!

Having upgraded to Debian 12 a couple of weeks earlier and with PipeWire
replacing PulseAudio as the sound server, I did have to revisit sound
level settings.  The pavucontrol app still works as before and still
seems to save audio level settings per application which means levels
can be set for both Tlf using SoX and WSJT-X using the ALSA plugin.

The improvements to Tlf are noticeable.  Thank you!

73, Nate

-- 
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."
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