Standard Information Exchange in Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The art of storing information in such a way that it doesn't devolve into random gibberish is an ongoing battle in the evolution of the human race. Egyptians five thousand years ago were perfectly happy storing information using hieroglyphs. They used it for well over three thousand years, but today you'd be hard pressed bumping into anyone on the street who knows one, let alone one thousand characters. Latin fared a little better. It's been in use for over two thousand years, but other than fields like biology, medicine and of course some religions, the best you can hope for is et cetera, mea culpa and my favourite, carpe noctum, that and a few mottos scattered about. Using technology to store information is no better. If you have a 3.5 inch floppy disc tucked away in a drawer, can you still read it today and do you know why it's called a floppy disc? What about a 5.25 inch, or 8 inch floppy. What about tape. Do you still have backups stored on DAT? Even if you could physically read the information, could you still make sense of it? Can you open a VisiCalc spreadsheet file today? That was invented during my lifetime, first released in 1979. The latest release was in 1983. My point being that storing and retrieving information is hard. Amateur Radio is an activity that has been around since the early 1900's, over a century of information. We describe our collective wisdom in books, magazines, audio recordings, websites, podcasts, videos and tweets. One of the more consistent sources of information coming from our activity is logging, specifically QSO or contact logging. There are bookshelves full of paper log files, but since the advent of home computing, logging now is primarily an electronic affair. If you've upgraded the software on your computer, you know the pains associated with maintaining your log across those transitions. If you've changed operating systems, the problem only got worse. Currently there are primarily two standards associated with logging, the ADIF and Cabrillo specifications. Both are published ways of describing how to store information in such a way that various bits of software can read the information and arrive at the same interpretation. As you might expect, things change over time and any standard needs to be able to adopt changes as they occur. How that happens is less than transparent and in an open community like amateur radio, that's a problem. Used primarily for logging contacts, the Amateur Data Interchange Format or ADIF is published on a website, adif.org. There's lively discussion in a mailing list and since its inception in 1996, it's evolved through many versions, incorporating change as it happens. Like the adoption of new digital modes, new country codes and administrative subdivisions. Used for contest logging, Cabrillo is published on the World Wide Radio Operators Foundation, or WWROF web site which assumed administration for the specification in 2014. It documents changes as they occurred, like adding contest names, station types and contest overlays. While there's clearly activity happening, there doesn't appear to be a public forum where this is discussed. Speaking of public. The DXCC, or DX Century Club is a radio award for working countries on a list. ADIF stores those country codes using the DXCC country code number, which is part of the specification published by the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League. The list of DXCC entities is copyrighted by the ARRL, which is fair enough, but you have to actually buy it from the ARRL to get a copy. This is a problem because it means that any future archivist, you included, needs access to a specific version of both the ADIF and the then valid DXCC list, just to read the information in a log file. To put it mildly, in my opinion, that's bonkers. Relying on external information isn't limited to ADIF. Cabrillo relies on external data for the format of the Location field which indicates where the station was operating from. Among others, it refers to the RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain who maintains a list of IOTA, or Islands on the Air, published on a web site that no longer exists. There are other issues. It appears that for the Cabrillo specification there is no incremental version number associated with any changes. Version 3 of Cabrillo was released in 2006. There are 31 changes published to update Version 3, but as far as I can tell, they're all called Version 3, so anyone attempting to read a Version 3 log will not actually know what they're dealing with. To give you a specific example of three changes. In 2016 the 119G band name was changed to 123G, which was changed in 2021 to 122G. All three labels refer to the same band, but until you actually start looking at the file will you have any indication about the version used to generate the file. Let's move on. Contesting. Not the logging or the on-air activity, but how to score a contest. What activity gets points and what incurs a penalty? Do you get different points for different bands, for different station prefixes, for low power, for multiple operators, for being portable and plenty more. Can you make contact with the same station more than once, if so, how often and under which circumstances? What is the exchange, how does it change, if at all? Each of these choices are weighed by contest managers all over the globe and they do it every time they run their contest. For some contests that means that there are dozens of rule versions across the years. To give you some idea of scale, the modern CQWW was first run in 1948 and there's at least one amateur contest every weekend. Now imagine that you're writing contest logging software that keeps track of your score and alerts you if the contact you're about to make is valid or not, or if it incurs a penalty if you were to log it. That software is driven by the rules that govern a particular contest. Some contest software is updated by the author every time a major contest is held to incorporate the latest changes. Other contest tools use external definition files, which specify how a particular contest is scored. As you might suspect, that too is information and it too is in flux and to make matters worse, there is no standard. So far, the tools that I've found that make any concerted attempt at this all use different file formats to specify how a contest is scored and of those, one explicitly points out that their file format doesn't incorporate all of the possible variation, leaving it to updating the software itself in order to incorporate changes that aren't covered by their own file format. That is sub-optimal to say the least. Personally, I think that there is a place for a global standards body for amateur radio, one that coordinates all these efforts, one that has a lively discussion, one that uses modern tools to publish its specifications and one that does this using public information with an eye on record keeping. I'm Onno VK6FLAB