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ADIF Multitool: Your Shell-Friendly Swiss Army Knife for Amateur Radio Logs

If you’ve ever wrestled with amateur radio log files—converting formats, fixing fields, or preparing for contest uploads—you’re going to love ADIF Multitool. Developed by Trevor Stone (WT0RJ), this mini Swiss-army utility streamlines everything you need, straight from the command line.

👉 Explore on GitHub: https://github.com/flwyd/adif-multitool (GitHub)

🔍 What It Is and Why It’s Useful

ADIF Multitool (called adifmt) is a free, open-source command-line tool written in Go. It helps operators validate, edit, and convert log files between formats like ADI, ADX, CSV, TSV, JSON, and Cabrillo (for contest submissions).

Whether you’re converting a CSV export to ADIF for a Parks on the Air upload or parsing JSON logs for analytics, adifmt can handle it all in a single shell pipeline.

⚙️ Key Features

Multi-format support: ADI, ADX, CSV, JSON, TSV, Cabrillo
Editable records: Add, modify, or drop fields on the fly
Field inference: Auto-calc missing fields like BAND, GRID, or LOCATION from existing data
Automated fixes: Format times, dates, GPS coords to match the ADIF spec
Validation: Enforces ADIF compliance and flags errors
Flexible CLI: Easily chain commands into powerful pipelines, e.g. filtering only SSB QSOs

🛠️ Installation & Quick Start

For tech-savvy users, installation is a simple one-liner if you have Go installed:

go install github.com/flwyd/adif-multitool/adifmt@latest

Or grab binaries from the GitHub releases page if Go isn’t on your system. Once installed, run:

adifmt help

And you’ll get instant access to all commands and options.

🧪 Example Use Case

Let’s say you’ve logged contacts in CSV while on POTA hunts. You can transform that CSV into a perfectly compliant ADIF using this pipeline:

adifmt infer --fields band,my_gridsquare log.csv \
  | adifmt fix \
  | adifmt validate \
  | adifmt find --if mode=SSB \
  | adifmt save final_log.ada

In minutes, you’ve inferred missing fields, normalized formats, filtered only SSB contacts, and generated a file ready for upload.

🤝 Community & Feedback

This tool started as a personal project and grew with help from the amateur radio community. Many users have praised its flexibility and ease of integration with scripts and logging workflows

The work is open source under the Apache‑2.0 license, and contributions—especially around release automation and additional validation—are welcome via GitHub discussions or pull requests