Randy, what I have been doing recently is choosing a "comparable station"
on the scoreboards. Someone in my region who has a station not too
differently capable than mine, or a little better than mine, and likely to
be doing a serious effort.
I then occasionally look at him vs me throughout the contest. It's nice to
watch the evolution of the score over time. When I'm doing great and
keeping up or nearly keeping up I feel good! When I'm not keeping up then
I'm thinking hard about how I can catch up!
I really like the graphing tools at cqcontest.net.
An example, in recent CQ WPX, N3QE vs W3LL as a graph. Not completely fair
comparison because W3LL was entering as a 48-hour multi-op, but in my
neighborhood and comparing my score certainly served as an incentive.
Graph is online here: http://n3qe.org/2017-WPX-CW-N3QE-vs-W3LL.pdf
You can see at the starting gun my station's strength on 40M let me keep up
with W3LL. Then I took an overnight break, and in first morning my
station's weaknesses on the high bands cause W3LL to pull far ahead. You
can see I was taking breaks but W3LL was not taking breaks. You also see a
little upturn in W3LL's graph in the last hour but mine tails off - I ran
out of my 36 hours of on-time in that hour, and presumably W3LL found some
juicy DX 3 pointers or extra-juicy 6 pointers, to work in that last half
hour.
Tim N3QE
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