At 12:04 PM 10/10/06, Ron Notarius W3WN wrote:
>Bud, with all due respect, I fail to see this as something
>"imperative," at least for the vast majority of single state QSO parties.
"Multi-state" QSO Party weekends were mentioned specifically and
that's the proper contest. The negative consequences of making
changes to well-established single-state QSO parties have been noted.
Which is precisely why the speculation that standardization was a
primary reason for introducing new county abbreviations in CQP didn't
seem very plausible.
On the other hand, consider this example: the first weekend in May
has the NEQP, 7QP, IndQP and the County Hunters contest all being run
simultaneously. That mix includes both well established contests and
some that are quite new. And three of the contests are
regional/national (multi-state) QSO parties.
In the span of five years, we've seen one set of 2x3 abbreviations
introduced for NEQP when that contest started up in 2002, the county
hunters specifying the use of 2x4 abbreviations in their contest in
2005, and the introduction of another set of 2x3 abbreviations for
7QP in 2006, plus the previously existing Indiana county
abbreviations. All for use on the same weekend.
>Trying to force all state QSO parties to change their methods to
>accommodate the needs of county hunters just seems to be a case of
>the tail wagging the dog, and it's just not necessary.
In the example cited above, commonality wasn't something that would
have made life easier on county hunters. It's something that would
have facilitated the simultaneous participation by contesters in the
multiple events. As it stands, an extra degree of mental and computer
gymnastics are required of many participants.
Certainly it would be a very neat feature for logging programs to
recognize the common variants of the exchange that are in use and
place the proper codes in the log for each contest.
As would the permissive change by the sponsors of also accepting a
common Cabrillo format from both in-state and out-of-state entrants.
That would save participants the chore of having to keep and/or
generate multiple logs if they wished to submit entries to more than
one event. That would make for more work for the log checkers but
less work for the participants.
73,
Mike K1MK
Michael Keane K1MK
k1mk@alum.mit.edu
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