Easy programming question here - How to correctly program an alert for any station from Albania on 60m, any mode, any time.
My buddy across town needs an alert for Albania on the 60-meter band. Very simple, yes? The DXCC prefix for Albania is “ZA”. Following the HamAlert Android screen instructions, we started a new alert by adding the prfixes ZA1,ZA2,ZA3,ZA4,ZA5,ZA6,ZA7,ZA8,ZA9,ZA0
No spaces. Just commas between the prefixes. HamAlert did not accept this. We’re obviously mis-interpreting the instructions. If there’s a web link with clear instructions, kindly send it here. Thank you, and Good DX : )
No need to use a “Prefix” condition, as you can use a DXCC condition instead:
The “Spotter state” condition is optional of course (and might overly limit the number of alerts you get, especially from sources where people spot manually, i.e. the DX cluster). But I’d recommend adding at least a “Spotter continent” condition so you don’t get lots of alerts from Europeans hearing the Albanian station at times where you have no chance of hearing them in North America.
That's perfect -- it's just what we were looking for.
Thank you vy much. And 73 73
Why not just use Prefix ZA and that will boci up all of the ZA regardless of what the rest of the callsign has. Is there any difference in Previs vs DXCC if the callsign starts with ZA?
Al N6TA
The prefix condition is often misunderstood/misused when the user actually wants to match on a DXCC. It is intended for things like WPX award chasing, and therefore matches “the beginning of the callsign up to and including any digits”. So if you were to put “ZA” in the prefix condition, the only alerts you would get would be for when somebody operates in Albania under CEPT (e.g. ZA/HB9DQM), but it would never match e.g. ZA1XX. So you would have to list them all, ZA0 to ZA9.
Besides, if you use a DXCC condition, you don’t have to worry about all the different prefixes that a country could use, e.g. France F or TM…