Reviewing Worked-but-Unconfirmed Counters
DXKeeper's Realtime Award Tracking service tracks the status of your progress towards the DXCC, IOTA, Marathon, VUCC, WAS, WAZ, and WPX awards. All but Marathon require confirmed QSOs; depending upon your award objectives, you may be pursuing confirmations for one or more of the following counters:
- DXCC entity
- DXCC entity-band
- DXCC entity-mode
- IOTA island
- VUCC grid
- VUCC grid-band
- WAS state
- WAS state-band
- WAS state-mode
- WAZ zone
- WAZ zone-band
- WAZ zone-mode
- WAZ zone-band-mode
- WPX prefix
- WPX prefix-band
- WPX prefix-mode
The Add Needed function selects worked-but-unconfirmed QSOs that if confirmed would advance progress towards your award objectives, as specified on the Awards tab of DXKeeper's Progress window. Add Needed does this for each award by inspecting your logged QSOs in reverse chronological order, and selecting each QSO it finds with a worked-but-unconfirmed counter that you are pursuing. On selecting a QSO, Add Needed
- adds an entry for that QSO to the QSL Queue
updates the Realtime Award Tracking service to reflect the fact that the QSO's status is now requested - so all of its counters are now (at the least) requested-but-unconfirmed; a counter that was already confirmed, submitted, or verified would remain in that state. It is the updating of the QSO's counters' states that prevents Add Needed from populating the QSL Queue with multiple QSOs for the same worked-but-unconfirmed counter.
However, requesting just one confirmation for a worked-but-unconfirmed counter may be sub-optimal when multiple candidates are available. The most recent QSO with a worked-but-unconfirmed counter may be with an op who is less assiduous at QSLing compared to an older QSO with the same counter. Alternatively, you may wish to simultaneously request confirmations for a counter from the ops or managers of multiple candidate QSOs in parallel, hoping to quickly receive one confirmation before the next DX Club meeting.
Before invoking Add Needed, you can use the tabs on DXKeeper's Realtime Award Tracking window to review worked-but-unconfirmed counters for the DXCC, IOTA, VUCC, WAS, WAZ, and WPX awards, and if desired add their QSOs to the QSL Queue. Suppose you are pursuing mixed DXCC:
on the Main window's QSL tab, set the QSL Via panel to QSL cards, Reply cards, Single labels, 2-column labels, 3-column labels, ADIF file, or Tab-delimited file as desired
display the Realtime Award Tracking window by clicking the RAT button above the Log Page Display on the Main window's Log QSOs tab
select the Realtime Award Tracking window's DXCC tab
in the DXCC tab's Award Progress Filter panel,
click the All button
uncheck the Unworked, Confirmed, Verified, and include deleted DXCC entities boxes; leave the Worked and Requested boxes checked.
The DXCC tab's Award Progress table will now list all current DXCC entities whose status is worked-but-unconfirmed or requested-but-unconfirmed; the Entity column in each row will display a W or R respectively. Starting with the first row in this table, double-click the W or R in the Entity column; DXKeeper will filter the Log Page Display to show all logged QSOs with the entity associated with that row. If you explicitly want a QSL card or label requesting confirmation to be sent to the op or manager associated with one of the these QSOs, right-click the QSO and select add to QSL Queue from the popup menu. Step through each successive row of the table, seeking QSOs with known-to-be-responsive ops or QSL managers.
Now suppose that you're also pursing DXCC in CW. In the DXCC tab's Award Progress Filter panel, change the Mode selector from MIXED to CW. The DXCC tab's Award Progress table will now list all current DXCC entities whose CW status is worked-but-unconfirmed or requested-but-unconfirmed; the CW column in each row will display a W or R respectively. Starting with the first row in this table, double-click the W or R in the CW column; DXKeeper will filter the Log Page Display to show all logged CW QSOs with the entity associated with that row. If you explicitly want a QSL card or label requesting confirmation to be sent to the op or manager associated with one of the these QSOs, right-click the QSO and select add to QSL Queue from the popup menu. Step through each successive row of the table, seeking QSOs with known-to-be-responsive ops or QSL managers.
This technique can be used to review worked-but-unconfirmed QSOs for any of the award counters listed above, choosing QSOs for which you'd like a confirmation requested by an outgoing QSL card or label. After you complete this assisted review, invoke Add Needed to populate the QSL Queue with the rest of the QSOs whose worked-but-unrequested-and-unconfirmed counters you are pursuing.