RATE IS KING and QRate
I administrate a webpage call RATE IS KING – The Best QSO rates in the contests . It is basicly a list of best qso rates achieved in the ham radio contests. Usually contesters are sending their updates frequently after the contests.
But what means “Qrate” on this page? QRATE is a simple DOS utility for determining the best hour, ten minutes, and minute from a contest log. So it means any best 60 minutes, not clock hours like it is in the statistics pages of contesting softwares. This simple software is quite old already, coded by VE3SUN in the early 2000s. You can download it from here. My problem was that this is made for DOS and I can’t run it with Windows 7. I did the following:
- I downloaded Qrate, unzipped and saved it to the hard disk (ie. J:\qrate)
- Then I downloaded DOS emulator called DOSBox from here and installed it.
- Then I made a Cabrillo file from my contest log (ie. CR6T.log) and saved it to same file than Qrate.
- I run DOSBox and typed a command MOUNT c j:\qrate
- Then like in an old DOS, typed c:, and checked that DOSBox really emulated my qrate-file as a C-drive.
- With “Rate” you get a short help text
- I made a qrate file with command RATE CR6T.LOG RATE.TXT 25, where 25 if offset for Cabrillo file (the first number of time is the 25th figure in a line)
And I found out that my best “Qrate hour” for CR6T was 187 (versus clock hour 185).
