Wednesday, November 3, 2010

New Feature of Logger32 - Show LoTW User

The current version of Logger32 (3.29.1) has a great New Feature. This feature will add a colored highlight to spots in the BandMap and the DX Spots Window to indicate stations who are known to be LoTW Users. As you can see in the photo of my 160-M BandMap at the left, spots from LZ2ZG, YL2SM, RA4LW, DL6ZXG, and UYØZG all are proceeded by a Green Highlight square. That tells you quickly that these stations are LoTW Users. WOW! Previously if you connected to certain Telnet servers, LoTW Users were indicated by a small "+" sign in the comment field. This was sometimes difficult to see and did not stand out in any way.

Here is the description of this feature from the Logger32 Help file:

Show LotW User

Logger32 has the capability of recognising a DX spot station who is known to use LotW (See also the section entitled Dx Spot Window). A colored highlight to the left of the DX callsign in the BandMap windows indicates a station that uses LotW. This menu item enables that option. Note that each bandmap carries this option separately.

Information for setting the highlight color and the uploading of the necessary LotW user data is given in the section entitled DX Spot WIndow


All you need to do is to download the LoTW Users file to your computer and then enable the display of the "Highlight" in the various windows (BandMap, DX Spots Window, and Monitor Windows.) Here are the Logger32 Help instructions for downloading the file:
To download the latest list of LoTW users, Right click on the DX Spot Window, Left Click SETUP | LOAD LOTW USERS FILE. Click on the “Download from the Internet” button to collect the txt file and follow this with the “Save data” button. This will create a new database LotWUser32 in the default Logger32 directory.
Once you have that file on your computer, you only need to enable the display of the Highlight in the various windows. The Help file tells you how to do it:
To enable/disable LoTW User highlights on the DX Spot Window, right click on the DX Spot Window, then left click SETUP | APPEARANCE | SHOW LOTW USER

To enable/disable LoTW highlights on the Band Map Windows, Click CONFIG | SHOW LOTW USER
I have been hoping the Logger32 crew would implement a feature like this and now that I have it, I can't believe I could ever get by without it!

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