About this episode
Foundations of Amateur Radio
The first step in solving any problem is recognising that there is one. In my case the name of that problem is "logging". Specifically the storage and collection of my amateur radio contact logs.
Just to be clear, the actual process of logging is fraught .. what do you log, as in, which pieces of information are germane to the purpose of logging, do you log your own callsign, or do you only collect that once per session, do you log in UTC, or in local time, if you're logging in local time, do you record where you're logging, do you record what power level, which antenna, what radio, the battery voltage, you get the idea.
Then there's .. when do you log? Do you log each and every session on-air, weekly nets, chat sessions on the local repeater, do you log the time when you establish the contact, once you've deciphered their callsign, or once the contact ends, and if you never wear a watch, how do you know what time it is?
What do you log with? Is it using pen and paper, pencil and paper, on a sheet of A4, or A5, in a binder, in a scrapbook, in an exercise book, in a journal, a diary, on ruled, grid or on plain paper, or do you log with a computer and if you do that, using which of the seven gazillion logging packages that are available to you?
I'm not talking about any of those things, though I suppose you could argue that I'm addressing one of the gazillion options, but stick with me.
I have, sitting on my desk, fourteen different logbooks. That's not unreasonable, almost one for each year that I've been licensed. Except that these books are not in any way consistent, they're essentially bound pieces of scrap paper with log entries scribbled in the available space, sometimes I've reversed a spiral notebook, just so I can avoid the spiral with my writing hand, sometimes it's oriented in landscape, other times in portrait. Some are smaller than A5, others are foolscap and intended for accounting purposes.
Next to that pile are too many empty logbooks, intended for future use. Why so many, you ask? Well it goes like this. You go to the office supply store to look for a suitable logbook. You buy it and try it. You use it for a bit and decide that you either love or hate it. If you hate it, you go back to the store to try and find another one. If you love it, your problem becomes finding an identical logbook. In a fit of inspiration, I loved the grid layout of my tiny spiral notebooks, and decided that this was the one for me, but they're no longer available, so instead I bought twenty A4 7mm grid exercise books with a soft cover, which I hate, and that was after trying to get a third Account Book Journal with a hard cover. There's also several A5 spiral bound books, but they're too chunky for portable operation and their spiral is annoying for logging.
There's also various empty ring binders and paper ready for logging in the garage. Who knew that there are apparently multiple disconnected
