In this episode, we have a great interview with Linux software developer and ham radio enthusiast from the Czeck Republic, Petr Hlozek – OK2CQR. He is the author of CQRlog and HamQTH.com. Unfortunately, Petr’s audio was a little hot and nothing we could do made it better. Our sincerest apologies. Sound problems aside, we hope you enjoy this fascinating look into the life and mind of an Open Source ham.

73 de The LHS Guys

http://lhspodcast.info/2014/05/lhs-episode-128-interview-with-ok2cqr/

I wanted to release new version after 17th of April but ARRL has changed addresses and autorization to LoTW. This is very important feature and I decided to release new version sooner. Changelog is quite long and includes a few nice features. Packages on Lauchpad are already created, CQRLOG should be available in distribution updates very soon.

Changelog:

• F keys to CW type window added
• address to RBN server can be changed in Preferences
• full date (not only year,month) is supported in membership files
• Close the "Status of log upload" window after successful upload added
• moved to new LoTW url and updated upload routines
• band button description is editable (Preferences -> TRX control -> Change default frequencies)

• 6W/MM0NDX was marked as unknown country instead of Senegal - fixed
• after View QSO and CTRL+F2 fields was still read-only - fixed
• QSL information was added to Commend to QSO even if it already exists
• '+' character is now allowed in any field in New QSO window
• log could not recover from a wrong upload of updated QSO - fixed

• '+' as hotkey to add to bandmap function removed, use CTRL+A instead
• any result from ClubLog with 'Skipping QSO' won't stop uploading of the log

More in Download section ...

News:

• after hitting ESC in any window opened from NewQSO, cursor will be returned to callsign edit field
• frequency in New QSO and QSO list wondow is formated to 0.0000
• added Help -> Keys and shortcut to menu in QSO window

• RBN integration into GrayLine showed CW speed instead of signal strench - fixed
• DXCC entity window didn't show when compiled in Debian Sid and Ubuntu 13.10 - fixed
• when CQRLOG was run for the first time, two mysqld proccesses opened the same database - fixed
• upload to ClubLog didn't work after enter QSO and delete - fixed (big thanks to Pawel, SQ5LTL)
• TRX control window's layout was broken with some font sizes - fixed

Download from http://www.cqrlog.com/download

It has been 14 days since the last release and we have new version again. There are a few bugs fixed and two new features added. This version is released so early because I hope it could get to new Ubuntu LTS. More in Download section.

Launchpad is going to start building packages in about one hour. Please be patient.

News:

• Enter key in Filter window will activate the filter
• blank locator field in Group edit clears locator field

• ADIF export didn't contain DXCC field with ADIF id of the country
• graline caused program crash after compile with recent FPC and Lazarus versions
• when the grid was in lowercase, the Big square statistic was broken
• bandmap didn't worked if the freq of QSO precision was to one Hz
• debug level settings didn't worked at all

• QSO will be confirmed when time difference between QSO and QSO from LoTW is not more than 10 minutes

More in Download section.

Today HamQTH.com celebrates two years anniversary with good health and growing number of users.

What was the most important news last year? We moved to new and much faster server with 28 GB of RAM, 4x1TB disk connected to RAID 10. Forum has been added, now is not visited so often but hopefully, it will get better in the future. UI was improved as well. Lots of changes were made to developers interface. Application developers can use DX cluster feed, dxcc callsign search, upload QSO in real time etc.

Recent news:

• Simple award verification protokol added (more in developers section)
• Feedback button added
• a few small bug fixed

HamQTH.com statistics:

• 527,346 visitors
• 4,080,887 page views
• 15,965 registered users
• 11,137,898 QSO in the log from 1,650 different callsigns
• 13,240,055 queries to XML search

It won't be possible without your support. Please upload your images to HamQTH, tell your friends about it and use it every day. If you like HamQTH.com, please consider small donation and/or put our banner to your home page.

73 Petr, OK2CQR
HamQTH.com owner

To commemorate our 75^th anniversary in May FOC is holding a month-long on-air event featuring at least 45 special FOC-suffix calls.  These will include GB75FOC, a special anniversary call for our club station.  (GC4FOC will be used when operating from Wales, GN4FOC from Northern Ireland, GP4FOC from Guernsey, GS4FOC from Scotland, and GT4FOC from Isle of Man).  A list of who is on the key of each special UK call each day can be found here. There will be many other FOC calls on the air all month from outside the UK, including some exotic locations such as 4X, 5B, 5T, 7Q, A6, HZ, KH6, V3 and VQ9.

News:

• added CTRL+W hotkey to send spots to dxcluster
• DX cluster shows also country name next to the spot (must be enabled in Prefereces)
• international characters in New QSO window should work again
• DX spots with freq eqauls to the start of the band (21.000, 14.000 etc., usually notes) are ignored
• HamQTH added to dx clusters list

• fixed reading A-index (was 1 even when actually was 10)
• /MM, /AM and stations with unknown DXCC country didn't appear in bandmap
• database update hangs
• fixed xml request address of qrz.com
• DXCC CFM count function didn't uses eQSL cfm QSO
• fixed reading mode from FT-920 (returned MEMO as VFO)
• fixed bug in dxcluster caused program crashed randomly
• program didn't apply eQSL rcvd when the band was in lowercase

Download: http://www.cqrlog.com/download

FOC is pleased to present the FOC QSO Party. This event is open to all radio amateurs world-wide. Its aim is to encourage the use of, and excellence in, Morse code. The FOC QSO Party is not a contest but an activity day in memory of Bill Windle, a past Chairman of FOC who was very keen that we should all be as active as possible on the bands.

Thanks to your donations, I could buy much better server. Now HamQTH VPS (virtual private server) has 3GB RAM and 90GB HDD. The old server has only 1GB RAM. I did tons of optimization but last few months the server was overloaded most of the time.

I'm going to move HamQTH to new server tomorrow (2012-09-12) early morning local time (around 02:00 UTC). It will be offline for 30 minutes or so. I already tried to move whole database (almost 4GB),users data (over 15 000 files), small programs which are running on background like ADIF import, FCC daily transaction import, DXCC XML search, utility that collects spots from RBN and DX cluster, another utility that reads spots directly from DX spider data files and do some statistics (DXCC, LoTW, eQSL) before stores it into database. Also tried to move scripts like auto backup, download eQSL, LoTW and DXCC tables etc. It worked quite well but I had to do some tweaks because new server is running on Ubuntu 12.04 server with MySQL 5.5. Older server has Ubuntu 10.04 with MySQL 5.1 installed.

I must say, new sever is far faster than the old one. I did some tests and it's excellent. From 3GB of memory I gave 1.8GB only to MySQL to cache indexes and data. So please fingers cross. I'll need that. 

I would like to thank you for donations. Without them, it wouldn't be possible to buy this new server. Now I can add more new functions because I won't be limited with 1GB of RAM. Thank you!!