Hello,
after the thread "Competitor friendly contesting", started in November
05 by Steve (ZC4LI), I looked for infos about operating time of
contesters and found that RDXC calculates the operation time of each
participant - and publishes them even by band.
www.rdxc.org/asp/pages/stat.asp?ID=0&YEAR=12
with lines looking such:
11 XX1XXX 0:13/8+0 1:24/69+0 3:24/338+0 7:27/504+180
4:56/432+2 2:40/228+0 20:04/1579+182
indicating time per band/CW+SSB-Qs
I counted the 745 single-operators in allband-categories of this 24-hour
contest with an everybody-can-work-everybody-format. Here are some
results (made in one-hour-steps and sorted also by mode and power
category). Complete set of numbers in a very simple spreadsheet will be
mailed to everyone interested in the figures or drawing some charts from
them - and finding my errors ;-)
The average operation time over those 745 hams not only participating
but also sending a log is less than 11 hours (10,8 average).
CW-Ops tend to go longer than SSB-Ops (22,2% of the CW-Stations operated
more than 16 hours and 15,5% of SSB-Stations)
HP keeps you longer at the radio than LP (30% with more than 16 hours
vs. 20%)
Among the 24 operation periods from 1 hour up to 24 hours the fulltime
activity has the highest percentage with 7,4 percent of the logs
showing more than 23 hours of activity.
BUT: after those happy ones there is a huge gap with the 23, 22 etc
periods until 18 hours falling below 2 percent. Greater percentages
follow in the 6 to 9-hour region with around 6 percent.
Grouped by 4-hour periods activity looks such:
20-24 h 13,7 %
16-20 h 9,9 %
12-16 h 14,1 %
8-12 h 22,4 %
4-8 h 22,1 %
0-4 h 17,7 %
Every eighth participant operates long enough to be competetive for top
scores (only 3 Stations with less than 23 hours made it into any top
five, with the exception of SSB-LP where the longest operation/endurance
time was 22:47 h).
Nearly two thirds of the log sending participants operated less than 12
hours - that´s what real life allows in an amateur sport (but compared
to other hobby sports it is already a lot, isn´t it?).
I´m afraid every new discussion about time based classes in analogy to
half-marathons or 10k-distances in marathon running events will receive
hostile reactions like "whiners who only want cheap plaques by watering
down" etc. As much as I favour ideas like i.e. the 6-hour-category in
BARTG-contest to bring more competition to real-life hams with a
time-budget below 24 hours a weekend - it would be at least a big first
step to publish the operation times (without new categories).
Without the operation time the majority of contesters below fulltime
level can´t seriously compare their results to the ones close above and
below (or shouldn´t we be regarded as contesters with not going close to
full time?). It´s like a list mixing running times from 100m up to
marathon without mentioning the individual distances. Without that
information you can claim "I´ve beaten CT1BOH" 241 vs. 228 QSOs in
RDXC. Won´t be very loudly claimed after the published information that
241 Qs took 6:30 hours while CT1BOH operated for 2:02 hours.
BTW: With such bandwise statistics even the big guns get an additional
serious tool to analyze their outcome.
Thanks for reading and best 73, Chris (DL8MBS)
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