Calls Manager

The Canadian Calls Manager and US provide a list of calls issued by the respective country.

#1 The calls manager provides an "incremental search" function. This means as you type a call is the search box the search occurs as you type. The first, small, button labeled "C" is a clear button. It provides two functions, the obvious function is clear the call search box. The second function, clicking the "C" button makes the call search box "current" so you can begin typing a call. Otherwise, if you had clicked or been browsing the calls list, to use the search box you must first click inside the search box.

The three extra buttons, "Analyze", "New Station" and "To Batch" behave the same as like named buttons found in the DX Gazetteer.

Analyze

To create a point-to-point prediction, select the desired target "call" and click the "Analyze" button.

New Station

The New Station button copies the current "call", location name and geographic coordinates to the "Station-Parameters Manager". This makes the new entry the default for all prediction types. This change is, of course, also shown in the Circuit-Configuration Manager. Additionally, the DX Gazetteer azimuth and distance items are relative to the current "station"; see the DX Gazetteer window-title bar.

To Batch

When you click the DX Gazetteer “To Batch” button, the current "call", location name and geographic coordinates are copied to the current Prediction Batch. Additionally, defaults are added for necessary "System", "X Ant" and "R Sys" groups. The default group for each of these is the one "currently selected" in the Circuit-Configuration Manager, or associated Manager or Browser.

Descriptions of the two menu items follow the brief description of #2 below.

The use and functionality of both the US and Canadian Calls Manager is almost identical. The difference between the two is the Canadian-Calls Manager does not provide the menu option. This means you can Import a new list of US calls at any time, but you must get a new Canadian calls table from our web site. The reason is, geocoding for these countries is done using the license address zip, or postal, code. The Canadian postal code table is very large, over 805,000 records, and so not included in the download and install. The US zip code table - while significantly large with 79,500 records - is small compared to the Canadian table.

#2 This are provides a grid type display of the available calls. Note the row, or record, with the green "selection" bar indicates a successful search.

Menu - Import -

Before you can import US calls data you must download and install some additional data required for the import. This is required only one time and also installs the Canadian calls data. Download this file:
http://www.taborsoft.com/wwizard/WWextra.exe

You can download and import new US amateur call sign data any time. The new call data is available each Monday. We need the "license" data to import. Take care to download the "full license" database and not the incremental update. The incremental update file is usually small, but will not work for this purpose. The full database is large at about 75 MB. The "application" data is also available for download but is not suitable for this purpose and will not import correctly.

While importing new call sign data we recommend you do not start any other WinCAP Wizard work that takes a significant amount of time. For example don't start a "grid squares" type prediction set while importing calls. It might work all right but we haven't tried. Obviously you can't import contest logs while importing call data, so WinCAP Wizard shows a message if you try.

Steps required for importing new US Amateur license data:

1. Download the call and license database from here: http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls/data/complete/l_amat.zip If clicking the link does start the download you must copy the link and paste it into your browser address space.
2. Use the windows "explorer" or "my computer" tool and navigate to the folder where you installed WinCAP Wizard. If you used the default hard drive path and folder name this folder will be "C:\WinCAP". Next change to a folder named "temp-import-data".
3. Un-zip three files named "AM.dat", "EN.dat" and "HD.dat" to the folder named "temp-import-data". The easiest way to get the three files from the zip into the target folder is likely to select all three then drag them from the zip and drop them into the target folder.
4. In the US-Calls Manager click the Import menu item.
5. If any of the required files are missing a message window will pop up and show the missing file name and the hard drive folder where the file is expected.
6. When the import process begins the window "status line" will become a "progress bar" and you can see how the import is progressing and get an idea of the time required to finish. The call import process will require about 11 to 18 minutes on the 1 GHz P3 machine used for developing the software. There are currently 723,687 call sign records in the database.
7. When the calls import process finishes you will see a message pop up and offer to remove the three "source" files you copied into the "temp-import-data" The three source file together are about 250 MB when un-zipped so a significant amount of hard drive space is wasted if you leave them. The three files are actually just moved to the "Recycle Bin". You will still have the "l_amat.zip" file you downloaded wherever you placed that. Also when the import is done the time required will appear in the US-Calls Manager status line.

Menu - Empty -

This menu item simply deletes all the call signs and data. The menu item is not necessary and is only included for your convenience. One reason too "empty" the US calls table would be to prepare to "back up" your hard drive or your WinCAP folder. The US calls table could be considered large and a back up process will require less time and proceed faster with the table empty.