I agree with Steve, N2IC. The IARU is a special contest. It's in the
summer, is popular internationally, includes CW and SSB both (or either),
encourages everyone to work everyone with a QSO point system that makes
sense, starts in the USA early morning, and runs for 24 hours. It's got it
all. The addition of all the many HQ stations has changed the contest. The
HQ station competition, while intense among the small number of these
groups, frankly is of little interest outside the HQ operators themselves.
It manages to take ten or twenty (or more) of the best operators in some
countries and involve them as a special team, but most people really don't
care which HQ station beats which other HQ station. From the accusations
and complaints, it seems the HQ competition is caustic and not constructive.
I don't know if the HQ stations' participation encourages more of the
general or casual operators to get on the air, but I do know that the
explosion of European HQ stations continues to tilt the contest away from
an ITU Zone-based multiplier system that is fair to everyone, and
overwhelms that with a cluster of EU-centric HQ mults that make the contest
one that requires an east coast presence in North America to compete, and
presents so many potential HQ mults in Europe that EU scores have
ballooned. The genie is out of the bottle, and it might not be possible to
move the IARU to more of a location-parity international contest with broad
activity. That surely would be nice, however.
Jim George N3BB
At 03:52 PM 7/17/2006 -0400, Steve London wrote:
>How about simply getting rid of all HQ stations as a special entity ?
>Create a multi-multi, single-location category, that anyone can enter,
>rather than this nationalistic entity.
>
>20 years ago, before HQ stations were added, this was a great contest.
>Now we have many HQ stations engaging in extremely unethical operating
>practices, which seem to be getting worse each year. How does the
>contesting community and amateur radio benefit from this ?
>
>There have been several more unintended consequence of having HQ stations:
>
>Instead of Europe being 5 Zone multipliers, it now has 5 Zones, and 20+
>HQ country multipliers. For USA stations, IARU has just become another
>East Coast-works-Europe QSO party, thanks to the availability of ~25 EU
>mults on each band. Activity from other parts of the world has dropped
>precipitously. Also, notice that the World winners are now in, or near
>Europe. 20+ years ago, it was possible to win this contest from South
>America.
>
>73,
>Steve, N2IC
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