On 9/1/09, Tom Osborne <w7why@verizon.net> wrote:
> '90. I had 685 Q's and had to go through the log and sort the multipliers,
> dupes, etc, by hand. That actually took longer than doing the contest. It
> was a real PITA to figure mults, etc. Keeping a dupe sheet was a real pain,
> also.
Man, do I remember that!
I remember a contest (CQ WW CW, I think it was) operated at K4VX.
Spent the day after the contest at Dave Patton (NN1N)'s apartment
checking for dupes and marking them in the log. (at the time you had
to; there was a penalty for having unmarked dupes in your paper log)
In a major advance, we had a Commodore 64 and software Lew wrote for
checking for dupes -- but we still had to key the entire log into the
C64 to do it.
I think some of us have been a bit remiss in explaining to the newer
contesters just how a paper dupe sheet worked.
The ARRL offered something called an "Op Aid 6".
http://www.k5tr.net/misc/2007_10_03_21_36_38.pdf
Basically a spreadsheet with ten REALLY TALL rows. Each row
corresponded to a call area; columns A..Z were used for suffixes
starting with A..Z. So if you worked W1AW, you wrote "AW" in Row 1
Column A; if you worked W9WI, you wrote "WI" in Row 9 Column W.
(and if you heard W3LPL, you looked in Row 3 Column L; if "LPL" was
there you knew he was a dupe.)
(ISTR there was an 11th row for Canada?) (ARRL and CQ published
something similar for DX contests)
They ran out of "W" calls well before my time; if you worked a "K"
call, you circled it. If you worked a "WA" call, you underlined it.
If you worked a "WB" call you underlined it twice. Or something like
that.
Obviously this could get out of hand once prefixes began
proliferating! As some have said here, one option was to write the
entire call in the column. But the original OpAid 6 wasn't really big
enough (it was a standard 8-1/2x11" sheet); your handwriting would be
awfully hard to read.
Some fixed that by making extra-large (11x17 or larger!) dupesheets.
I would suggest this would be too big to conveniently fit in many
shacks...
IMHO we really did switch to computer logging just in the nick of time.
(and I am somewhat surprised and disappointed that you can't still
download an OpAid 6 PDF from the ARRL website!)
==
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View, TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com
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