It is great to see interest in creating more entrants in the CQWW contests... THANKS for the input! Just as an FYI, here is some data for 2011 SSB (so far). These are e-logs, which means that paper l
Hi Doug, Any chance you have historical data on this? Might be interesting to see if there is a trend. Are operators operating less of the contest now than they were, say, ten years ago? Twenty? Just
With an aging contest participant population I would feel that less time in the chair is probable... Not the iron men we...no, I'll exclude myself...they once were. -- Jack, W6NF Silver Springs, NV D
Interesting data. I wonder what it would look like for the whole data set including people who don't submit logs. I suspect it would be even more skewed toward smaller hours. Actually, I think there'
You may find this article "The 24 Hour Dx Challenge" and the accompany survey on contesting.com http://www.contesting.com/articles/401 This approach has support. All it requires is a group to organi
I believe there is a place for time limited categories in contesting. It would increase participation and activity among some people if they had an outlet for their competitive spirit even though the
However, there is a very real danger of unintended consequences. Whatever time limit is set, there will be some people who operate more to maximize their time under the limit. There will be other peo
Absolutely - whenever a competitive category is created, expect the competitors to enter it. Randy is spot on about consequences which are likely enough for a sponsor to avoid them. Proceed with cau
Well, the goal here is not to create a noncompetitive category. It would simply be to give operators a chance to be competitive in a shorter category. So yes, you are correct. The real competitors wi
Randy said: "If we had a time limited category, it would tend to drive activity to the already high activity periods. It would tend to discourage activity in the slow times. Not helpful." Wouldn't a
It's very wise to be cautious. What I'm suggesting as a starting experiment is not to change a contest at all. Instead, contest organizers (more accurately those who publicize the results) can be mor
Syl - thanks, very interesting survey and comments! Thanks for the pointer. I think that survey data and comments, although valid, probably don't reflect the views or predict the behavior of all thos
If there were a limited category and many or most of the current full-time ops cut back, that tells you something right there - that the 48h category has outlived its usefulness as the contest commun
Any time that there is a rule change, or a category addition or deletion, or a rescheduling, there will be -- always! -- unintended consequences. That should not be, in and of itself, a reason to avo
In contests with public logs, the entire data set is right there for the analyzing. There are parsers and analyzers (CBS.exe, for example) that find all sorts of metrics in a Cabrillo-formatted log