Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Cabrillo and ADIF are likely two terms you've heard if you've done anything with logging or contesting. So what are they, how do they work and why does it matter? Let's start with Cabrillo. It's a file format used for submitting an electronic log to a contest manager. It was developed by Trey N5KO in 1999 for the ARRL. It's up to version 3.0, but the intent is that the older v2 files are still readable by todays programmes. The aim of the Cabrillo format is to provide some meta information, like the contest name, the person who did the contest, what club they're part of, where they live, what category, etc. After that, each contact is shown as a single line with a fixed format that shows the frequency, the mode, time-stamp, exchange and other pertinent details. Significantly it does not contain any point information, because the intent is that the contest manager imports each log and their software calculates the actual score, dealing with the rules as defined by the contest,