The Contact You Can't Find Six Months Later
You worked W6XYZ on 40m during a ARRL contest three seasons ago. You had a solid 579 copy both ways, exchanged names, the operator mentioned he was running an IC-7300 with a hex beam, and you had a brief but good ragchew. You want to follow up — or verify the contact for a WAS confirmation — and you have nothing. The paper log from that operating session is in a binder somewhere. Maybe.
The operators who never have this problem are not the ones with better memory. They are the ones with a structured digital log that they actually maintain, and that they can search by call sign in under ten seconds while sitting at the rig.
What Nine Fields Capture About a QSO
The log structure is lean by design. Call sign (theirs), Start datetime, Stop datetime, Signal report (theirs), Signal report (mine), Name of contact, Location of contact, QSO content, and a calculated Duration field. Nine fields, and every serious operator has needed every one of them at some point.
The dual RST fields — Signal report (theirs) and Signal report (mine) — record the exchange as it actually happened, not as a symmetric assumption. A 579 sent and a 449 received is a real and common scenario: your signal is punching through fine, but propagation or their antenna situation is making the copy rough on your end. Having both numbers in the record tells you something about the band conditions that day, and about what that station's setup is capable of receiving.
Start and Stop datetimes feed the Duration calc: numToStr(rint(if(#{stop}!=0,(#{stop} - #{start})/60,0))) + ' min'. The if-guard on stop prevents a nonsense duration on records where the stop time was not entered. The result is a plain integer in minutes — no floating-point noise, no "0.97 hours" ambiguity. A sixteen-minute contact is logged as 16 min.
QSO content is the field that separates a meaningful log from a bare contact record. The operator who writes "40m SSB, running 100W to dipole, conditions poor K-index 4, discussed antenna builds, he's building a vertical for 80m" has something to reference the next time W6XYZ appears in a pileup. The operator who leaves it blank has a timestamp and a call sign.
Finding the Contact at 0200 Local
The use case that validates a searchable log is not the leisurely post-session review. It is the moment during a late DXpedition pile-up when you think you may have already worked this DXCC entity last year on this band, and you need to know before you spend another forty minutes in the pile. A Memento search on the partial call sign pulls the record in seconds. Start datetime confirms the band and date. The signal report and duration fields tell you whether the contact was solid enough to count.
Location of contact handles the geographic dimension that matters for DXCC and WAS tracking. Free text is the right choice here — some contacts give you a city, some give you a grid square, some give you a county for a county hunter event, and some give you just a country. Forcing a dropdown would break every edge case. Free text captures what was actually exchanged.
Name of contact is the field that makes a log feel like a record of human interactions rather than a frequency ledger. Operators who log names find that over time the log becomes a directory — the next time a familiar call sign appears on the waterfall, the name is in the record, and the contact starts as a conversation rather than a cold exchange.
The Duration field does its most useful work in aggregate. A month of logs where the average QSO duration is four minutes tells you something different than a month where the average is twenty-two. If you are working on your operating skills — learning to run a pile-up cleanly, practicing CW at speed, building toward a rag-chew style — the duration pattern across logged contacts is the feedback the air itself does not give you.