I'm an avid contester, and I've a practical zero chance to qualify for WRTC on
my zone (SA2) ; still I do use the WRTC criteria to define the strategy for
each of the contest I do participate.
So when I read carefully the rules I indeed find out that some of the changes
erodes my chances while others actually enhance them; quite a few are actually
neutral.
Then I witnessed the heated debate and the closed arguments, but only few of
them I found were actually anchored in data.
In the first place, from all the eligible contesting population fewer than 5%
are actually serious contenders for the WRTC; so somehow 95% of the contesting
population are largely unaffected by it.
A close second comes with the fact that WRTC actually is a meta-rule to set the
framework to classify for a particular event (no matter how desirable and
prestigiuous it might be), the provisions about assisted/non-assisted or power
or so/multi doesn't really touch a bit the classification in the underlying
contests; so people can happily won their category at any given contest despite
the points earned towards WRTC.
And the third is that after carefully reading both the english and german
announcements from the WRTC committed I failed to actually grasp any clue in
support of the notion that they are running a poll towards the final ruleset;
it has all the aesthetics of an announcement, a final one (specially, if my
weak german serves me well, in the german version).
So I believe there are little data to support the notion that this ruleset
would change the contesting landscape for the next two years.
Finally, my 2 cents on the assisted vs. non-assisted debate. I'd ran on the
suggestion of an early poster that the performance of QSO vs. Mult in any given
contest for assisted and non-assisted would "spot" cheaters, citing using the
3830 reflector data on CQ WW for that.
My math/statistical background make irresistible to verify that and I actually
ran this analysis, and repeated it for other contest. The results for the CQ WW
as once despicted in the 3830 reflector for the SO AB HP assisted and
non-assisted can be seen in this link (it's a virus-free JPG file).
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4PlCJ6yGfB4/VH8-Nj2r3uI/AAAAAAAAC00/kQInnMHBkEc/s1600/CQWWCW_2014_Performance.jpg
The graph can visually tell, and this can be confirmed by more rigorous data
processing with MiniTab (an statistical analysis package) the following:
Assisted are stronger on multipliers whilst Non-assisted are stronger on QSO,
outliers and out-of-this-world operators the rest of us trades one for the
other.Non-assisted (red) in the Assisted zone (blue) also inherit the
multiplier focus in detriment of the qso focus, so their gain is relative if
any.The dispersion in the population makes the attempt to qualify as "cheaters"
the red ones in the blue zone with any degree of confidence, it's just not
statistically sound as an approach.A sizeable proportion of the population
applies for SO AB but actually had a dominant behaviour in one band and thus
their multiplier performance converges into the single banders.
Hope it help to the debate.
>From myself I'm already looking forward to see what strategies makes more
>sense under the new WRTC rules to magnify the little I have and to mitigate
>the most I don't.
73 de Pedro LU7HZ/LT7H
Dr. Pedro E. Colla
Va.Belgrano-Ciudad de Cordoba
Cordoba- Argentina
"Que el hombre sepa que el hombre puede.".A.Barragán, Expedición Atlantis..
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