Gotta agree with Ken, the resolution is pretty bad until you get into the mid
1990s. Some pages are skewed; some just scanned poorly.
One thing that I've been looking at is the activity of contests over time, and
their popularity. One striking example seems to be Sweepstakes which has seen
a significant reduction in points scored over time.
I know that its basically impossible to compare one year to another given that
band conditions can change from minute to minute, but the Sweeps scoring has
definately slackened. On SSB, (excluding WP3R naturally), scores are down
about 10% with QSOs counts down. Multipliers are up by 2 or 3 from the mid
1990s owing to new sections. The addition of 3 multipliers to a 2000 QSO score
adds 12,000 points to the score over a 2000 QSO score from 1995. So, if you
deducted teh 12,000 points, scores are down probably more on the order of 15%.
I haven't looked at CW, but it will be interesting to assess scores in light of
the ageing of the amateur population, the drop in CW requirements, and
refinement of SO2R.
73 Rich NN3W
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth E. Harker" <kenharker@kenharker.com>
To: <n2ic@arrl.net>
Cc: "CQ Contest" <cq-contest@contesting.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 3:16 PM
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] New ARRL Benefit and a Contesting Challenge
> Cool.
>
> I've played around with the QST on CD-ROM trying to see if it would be useful
> for extracting old line scores into computer-readable format. When I tried
> it
> a few years ago, my conclusion was that the resolution of the scans on the
> CD-ROMs were not adequate for OCR. In fact, some of the line scores from the
> ARRL 10 Meter Contest in the 70s were so small in print and the scans were of
> such low resolution that you actually could not read the scores, let alone
> OCR them. It appears that the QST archive online are these same, relatively
> low-res scans (I think they are 200 dpi or less). You can see what I mean
> (assuming you have an ARRL login) in these line scores:
>
> http://p1k.arrl.org/cgi-bin/topdf.cgi?id=70267&pub=qst
>
> It would be great if older QSTs could be re-scanned at higher resolution,
> and maybe OCR'd at the same time, but certainly this is a great resource
> to have available online nonetheless.
>
>
> As for a favorite contesting article, I vote for this one from 1991:
> http://p1k.arrl.org/cgi-bin/topdf.cgi?id=86285&pub=qst
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 12:26:09PM -0600, Steve London wrote:
>> Check this out:
>>
>> http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2008/09/09/10322/
>>
>> I would love to see nominations for the 20 best contest-related QST articles
>> of
>> all time....
>>
>> 73,
>> Steve, N2IC
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> CQ-Contest mailing list
>> CQ-Contest@contesting.com
>> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
>
> --
> Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
> kenharker@kenharker.com
> http://www.kenharker.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
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> CQ-Contest@contesting.com
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