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Re: [CQ-Contest] Why some Caribbean Islands compete as South America at

To: cq-contest@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Why some Caribbean Islands compete as South America at CQWW and other contests
From: Jim Brown <k9yc@audiosystemsgroup.com>
Reply-to: k9yc@arrl.net
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 22:42:38 -0800
List-post: <cq-contest@contesting.com">mailto:cq-contest@contesting.com>
On Mon,11/9/2015 8:13 AM, Ron Notarius W3WN wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, the basic argument is that a station in "continental" South America, all else 
being equal, will always "lose" to a station in the "offshore/island" Caribbean station 
located within the SA continental boundaries.

The fundamental problem is that the guys in PY, LU, CX, and CE have the same competitive disadvantage by virtue of their location with respect to population centers as do we on the west coast of the USA, and those in VK/ZL, and in much of AS.

A contest scoring system based entirely on arbitrary (and very simplistic) rules like countries and continents, paying no attention to distance or geography, leaves out a LOT of hams that would like to compete but cannot. Such rules are DUMB in today's world -- they were designed half a century ago by those who lived in the "real," "civilized" parts of NA, and were simple enough that scores could be computed by simple multiplication of numbers on a piece of paper.

N6TR came up with a FAR better scoring system for the Stew Perry contests -- it was so good that ARRL wanted to adopt it, but as I heard it, Tree didn't want to lose control of it so that someone could screw it up. I don't blame him a bit. Tree's system is simple enough that the distance-based score for each QSO is computed by the logging sofware and displayed in the log. The only thing the logger can't do is give bonus credit for the TX power of the station you worked -- that's done in log checking. And Tree's system is far from the only one that could make sense, and that could easily be scored in real time by modern logging software on almost any shack computer.

Unless or until the contesting "powers" that love the rules because the rules favor them wakes up and decides that the rest of us deserve to be competitive, those of us outside those favored population centers are going to vote with our feet and not take these contests seriously. Those with bucks will continue to travel to islands where they have a better shot at winning, and to build contesting stations in ME and VY2 so that they can be closer to the mults in EU.

THAT'S why there's so little activity from so many countries in so many of these contests, which makes it much less fun for the rest of us because we run out of stations to work.

73, Jim K9YC
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