DX4WIN

VUCC Map

Create VUCC Map from DX4WIN Award Listing

VUCC is the VHF/UHF Century Club Award offered by the ARRL.

The "VUCC" program creates a map of worked VUCC grid locators from the VUCC Band Listing created by DX4WIN. The program shows both confirmed (bold) and worked locators.

The latest version of the program is 1.4 and was last modified on 3 June 2006. Click on this link to download the program.

The program will only run in a Command Prompt under Windows.

Just extract VUCC.EXE from the .ZIP - if you then type VUCC and get the usage message, you're OK.

To generate the VUCC listing needed by the program:

In DX4WIN:

• Reports -> VUCC -> Band Listing
• When the listing window comes up, right-click with the mouse and choose "Write to File". Give the file a name (no spaces) with a .csv extension. Save the file in the same directory as VUCC.EXE.

To run the program, you must select a band (or frequency) and a starting grid field.  To select the band, look at the Band Listing before you save it. If the top row lists bands, you must pick a band. If the top row lists frequencies, you must pick a frequency. The band or frequency must match the listing exactly (capitalization is important). The valid band are:

6m, 4m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, 35cm, 23cm, 13cm, 9cm, 6cm, 3cm, Sat

The valid frequencies are:

50MHz, 70MHz, 144MHz, 220MHz, 440MHz, 900MHz, 1.3GHz, 2.3GHz, 3.3GHz, 5.6GHz, 10GHz, sat

The field is the first two letters of the locator, and the field you select will be the bottom left corner of the map. The map is 4 fields high by 3 fields wide (because it fits nicely on a printer in landscape mode). For example, if the lower-left corner is DL (or DL00), then the plot would look like:

In the example, above, the upper-right corner will be FO99. You can see an example by clicking this link.

Now you are ready to run the program! In a (MS-DOS) command window, type:

vucc <band/freq> <GRID/FIELD> <dx4win.csv> <vucc.htm>

Do not type in the "<>". The Grid/Field can be a two-letter field or a 4-letter grid locator, and can be in UPPER or lower case. The .CSV file is the band listing file you saved earlier. The last parameter is the name of the output file, make sure to give it a .HTM extension.

After the program runs, it will tell you how many grid locators were read and written, i.e.:

Map VUCC Grids Worked/Confirmed - Version 1.4
Jim Reisert, AD1C - Jun 3 2006 20:30:42

Read 321 grid locators from vucc.csv
Wrote 188 locators to vucc.htm

To see the results, either type the output file name at the command prompt, i.e.:

e:\dx4win\vucc> vucc.htm

Or type the URL into a web browser:

file:///e:/dx4win/vucc/vucc.htm

I've found that if you view the output file using Mozilla Firefox, Print Preview in landscape mode and scale "Shrink to Fit", that you can print the entire map on an 8.5 x 11" sheet of paper. I could not do this same thing in Internet Explorer, if someone knows how, please let me know!

Known Problems:

The map won't wrap properly at the International Date Line. I'm just too lazy to fix this.

Other Resources:

The ARRL has some conversion tools on their web site.

ICOM America has a grid square map for USA on the downloads section of their web site.