[Xastir] Search FCC database not working?

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 02:40:22PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <wa7nwp at jnos.org> flavor, containing:
> 
> 
> 
> > Looks like that was my problem too...thanks for the tip!
> > 
> 
> > >> Is anyone else having problems with the "Search FCC database" button not
> > >> finding call signs?
> >
> > > Yes, I have seen this happen.  Look carefully at the first and last few
> > > lines of your EN.dat file.  Last time I updated, these early and final lines
> > > appeared to be scrambled --- it looked as if there were some corrupt lines
> > > of the input that got placed funny by the sort operation.
> > >
> > > When I deleted them and let xastir reindex the file (by removing the
> > > .xastir/data/appl.ndx file) the behavior went away.
> 
> THANKS!   That fixed my problem with the FCC data.  Got so bad  a couple days ago
> I only had 2 of 8 (or so that I checked) work.   I just used Head and Tail to clean off the
> ends of the file, did the reindex trick and now I'm 10 for 10 (or so).
> 
> What's the quick fix?   How about this at the sort phase:
> 
>    grep '^EN' <  (source file) | sort ...

OK, I lied --- in fact I *HAD* a copy of l_amat.zip from a previous download,
and was able to check what's going on.

There are about 8 entries in the file with "^M^M^J" (that is, two CRs and a
newline) embedded in the address field.  This is confusing the sort procedure
and results in a few lines of the sorted data that don't fit the pattern
the fcc lookup feature requires.  By deleting the broken lines we get the 
thing to work, but we're also getting broken entries for those 8 hams.

A filter to strip out "^M^M^J" before sorting would fix this.  An appropriate
"sed" incantation might do the trick.  I would expect that this sort of junk
will only appear more often in the FCC data and we should figure out a way
to clean it out.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 
 "When life gives you lemons, find someone with a paper cut."