I've been working for a while on some Palm software for doing ham radio contest logging, mainly for use in the field. Some of you may have seen the article I wrote for the Summer QRP Quarterly which described the CW sending hardware which goes along with it.

Well, I've finished the first version of the software for the Palm, and it's now on my web site for downloading. The software is called GOLog and has the following features:

- customizable for pretty-much any contests
- does dupe-checking
- includes a Windows conduit for use with Palm Desktop software, so you can get your logs from your Palm to your PC (as an ASCII file)
- includes a setup program for getting the Palm software and Windows conduit software installed
- it works with the Serial CW sender device I designed and published in QQ (but can also be used without it)
- it's freeware

Some shortcomings:

- it doesn't do much error checking of your log entries
- you can't vary your outgoing exchange (e.g. RST) from one contact to the next without some work (please, no hate mail--I'll add it for the next version)
- this really isn't suitable for general QSO logging, only contest logging

I used this hardware and software during Field Day this year, portable on the top of Mt. Herman, and logged 175 contacts with it, so it's usable. But if you don't like the Graffiti input, you're not going to like this software (although you can pop up the "keyboard" whenever you want, I suppose). At any rate, it's free so you can give it a try.

The Palm app itself only takes up about 40KB of space, but the setup program which includes the desktop conduit is about 1.1MB in size. You can download the software from my web site:

http://home.earthlink.net/~ekdave/golog.html

While you're at it, go through the front door at

http://home.earthlink.net/~ekdave/ and sign the guestbook.

You'll also see a link to a slightly-updated version of the QQ article on the serial CW sending hardware (including the PIC code), in case you're interested.

If you give any of this a try, let me know what you think.

73 de Dave NK0E