Oms and I had this discussion a number of months ago.
Oms states "The selection criteria based upon results is one of the major
request from our contest population."
I don't know who was asked. I suspect a few members of previous WRTC
committees or well known contesters who do the Sprint. At the time I did
some research. This is what I found and emailed to Oms.
"In the most recent Feb '05 CW NA Sprint there were only about 190 entries.
There was a measly 134 entries for the Feb '05 Phone NA Sprint. In the most
recent Nov '04 Sweepstakes there were 1557 logs for phone and 1113 logs in
CW. In the most recent Feb '05 ARRL DX contest there were 1187 US/VE CW
entries and 1156 US/VE phone entries. Clearly the Phone Sweepstakes is the
MOST POPULAR U. S./VE contest, by FAR.
For comparison, there were about 1165 logs submitted from the U. S. for the
2004 CQWW SSB DX contest and about 1100 logs for the 2003 CQWW CW DX contest
(the 2004 CW results are not published yet, so I used 2003.) The 2004 CW WPX
contest had under 650 U. S. logs submitted. The 2004 SSB WPX contest had
even fewer U. S. logs submitted. The CQWW contests might have the
reputation, but the Sweepstakes and ARRL DX contests have the popularity in
the U. S. These are simply the facts. Please, look at the ARRL and NCJ Web
Sites and the CQ magazine results issues to confirm my statements.
For the NA sprint to be worth more points than the ARRL DX contest when it
has less than 14% of the entries and 8.3% of the operating time and equal in
points to the Sweepstakes which has over 8X the entries and 6X the operating
time is just not right."
In another email in our correspondence I pointed out:
"What skills in the NA Sprint carry over to WRTC, or ANY other contest for
that matter? Absolutely none! In the NA Sprint you can't hold a CQ frequency
so you don't make decisions about the consequences of moving multipliers
(you don't need to move multipliers at all,) you don't make decisions about
propagation since it is not a DX contest, it is not a mixed mode contest so
you don't make decisions about whether and when to operate phone or CW and,
perhaps most importantly, it doesn't test an operator's endurance, which is
a major component of being competitive in every other amateur radio contest.
The WRTC is a 24 hour, mixed mode DX contest. The applicants should be
judged and selected on that basis."
Oms disagreed with me then also. Well, it is their football and they make
the rules. However, it does make a BIG difference.
As far as the US West entries go, N6MJ is ahead of me by 17.15 points. Four
of his best 8 contests for WRTC consideration are from the 4 hour NA Sprint.
Only one of mine is. So for operating 12 hours, Dan gets about 50 points on
me for my 100+ hours of operating in more popular (by entries) contests.
This is not to denigrate Dan's contesting skills in any way. It is just an
example of what I perceive as the inherent lack of fairness in the selection
criteria. I'll have to wait and see if there is another higher scoring US
West entry that bounces me from #2.
You can say this is sour grapes on my part, and you might be right about
that. But at least my grapes were grown in a logical fashion.
73, Ken, K6LA / VY2TT
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