[Dxspider-support] upcoming release

[charlie carroll]

In the dark ages, also known as the pre-internet, 1200-baud radio era,
we used to simply turn off mail during contests.  Why would anyone in
their right mind want to read mail during a contest?  Guess my contest
bias is showing through again!

Steve's (K2SC)'s suggestion of showing a "mail-available message" every
ten minutes has some merit.  However, a 10-minute timer approach may not
be the good either.  In the recent CQWW CW contest, there was almost 34k
worldwide spots in the 48 hour timeframe.  Crunching the numbers says an
average of 1 spot every 5 seconds.  This means that a full screen of
spot data could go by in a time as small as 1 minute.  Similarily, if
you are filtering spots and using a large screen, the time to scroll off
a full screen of spots is much larger.  Maybe the solution is more along
the lines of a user-settable number of spots between each
"mail-available" notification.  This way each user could customize
depending upon the individual situation for number-of-displayed lines
and filtered spots.  And then again, maybe this is just taking it to an
unnecessary extreme and a KISS approach might be the best because no one
worries about mail during a contest.

FWIW, there is a very popular logging program over here known as the
N1MM logger.  I subscribe to its mail reflector.  The Monday after each
contest I look at all the mail from this reflector.  I am absolutely
amazed at the number of people that send multiple e-mails to the
reflector when the contest is running.  I'm ever more amazed that N1MM
occasionally provides bug fixes to his program during the course of the
contest!  Just goes to show that people do read all kinds of mail during
a contest.

Anyway, Happy New Year to everyone.  It's nice to see that Dirk's able
to participate again and that many folks are in a talkative/contributing
mood.

I will be putting an updated version of the US Database (usdbraw.gz) on
my website on 1 January.  An updated version will generally be available
on the 1st of each month.  

73 charlie, k1xx