On FM satellites the grid is the exchange - it is what the other station sends you and what
you send back. Until now it could only arrive by scraping QRZ, which needs a cookie the
operator may not have pasted, and which returns nothing at all for a station with no locator
on file. So the field that carries the actual content of an FM contact was the one field the
operator could not fill in.
It is the second field, optional, six characters, uppercased. A typed grid also skips the
QRZ lookup entirely rather than racing it: what the operator heard on the air beats what a
web page says, and letting the scrape overwrite it would silently replace good data with a
guess.
The value is captured before the field clears, so the QSO carries it and the next contact
starts empty. WavelogQso.gridsquare already existed for the scraper to fill, so nothing about
the stored shape changes and no migration is needed.
This was the interaction study's second-ranked conclusion, after the editable time. Both come
from the same observation: the screen was built for someone typing during a pass, and the
operators it is for are working the radio instead.
mckero
cb3ebe7870