I believe that at some point in the past, someone did an analysis of
what would happen to a past contest if the scoring metric was changed
from the current scoring format (I believe it was a CQWW contest, but it
may have been an ARRL DX test) to a distance based scoring metric.
IIRC, for the most part, those who won then (under a traditional system)
would continue to have won under distance based format. One or two "out
of the blue" entrants cracked the "box", but the winners were still, by
and large, the winners.
Now, that is hindsight, and behaviors change based upon the rules, but I
have to agree with Kelly, that if you can't work/hear the DX in the
first place, you are only going to gain so many points when the marginal
band or path does open.
73 Rich NN3W
On 11/10/2015 10:23 AM, Kelly Taylor wrote:
Hello Jim,
First off, let me assure you I have the greatest respect for your technical
prowess and appreciate all your efforts to help anyone who asks.
However, I respectfully disagree on the merits of distance-based scoring.
How does distance-based scoring do anything other than swap one unlevel playing
field for another?
Consider:
It’s 7 a.m. Sunday morning and K5ZD is running 3,500-mile QSOs into Europe at 200/hr
when you can’t even tell Europe is on the band? You get more per Q when Europe finally
opens to the Bay Area, but are you going to work them at the same rate?
It’s at virtually any time during the contest and P40V is cranking through
300/hr with 5,000-mile distant Europeans and 10,000-mile distant Asians, Oceanics and
VU2s. All of whom are as loud to him as W6YX is to you.
It’s late Saturday night and you’re on 80. As you tune across the band from your Winnipeg location, you hear
K5ZD, NQ4I, P40V, and a hundred other stations working, at high rate, stations you can’t even tell are on the band. So
you plug away at working Americans, knowing your QSOs are worth half the distance or less. If you’re lucky,
you’ll beat the pileup of Europeans you can’t hear and work the odd Aruba-Bonaire-Curaçao station.
The fallacy of distance-based scoring is it begins with the supposition everybody has access to the
same distant stations, or would, if they had a big enough station. But that’s just not true.
There’s a reason the Black Hole is called the place RF goes to die. And even when we can work
Europe, we rarely drill down more than the first couple of layers. On 80 and 40, we’re pretty
much limited to the odd superstation.
In the U.S., the Northeastern stations will always have more access to more
Europeans than you have access to PacRim stations. For those in the centre of
the continent, stations around the perimeter (K1,2,3,4,5,6,7, VE1, 9, VY2 and
VO1) will always have access to greater-distance Qs, often with stations
barely, if at all, audible to you. And stations such as P40V and HC8N will
always have more access to EVERYBODY than you or I could ever hope to have.
The reason a VE4 log in WW is predominantly American is that, while each QSO is fewer
points, at least it’s someone...
In the end, WW results wouldn’t change much, if at all, under distance-based
scoring.
The scoring model for the Stew Perry is interesting, but it doesn’t help many
stations in the least.
In VE4 we accept our lot and still try to have as much FUN as we can. We don’t
predicate fun on winning. Because it says here if a VE4 ever wins WW, it will only be
because massive tectonic activity turned Winnipeg into an oceanside community.
73, kelly
ve4xt
On Nov 10, 2015, at 12:42 AM, Jim Brown <k9yc@audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:
On Mon,11/9/2015 8:13 AM, Ron Notarius W3WN wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, the basic argument is that a station in "continental" South America, all else
being equal, will always "lose" to a station in the "offshore/island" Caribbean station
located within the SA continental boundaries.
The fundamental problem is that the guys in PY, LU, CX, and CE have the same
competitive disadvantage by virtue of their location with respect to population
centers as do we on the west coast of the USA, and those in VK/ZL, and in much
of AS.
A contest scoring system based entirely on arbitrary (and very simplistic) rules like countries and
continents, paying no attention to distance or geography, leaves out a LOT of hams that would like
to compete but cannot. Such rules are DUMB in today's world -- they were designed half a century
ago by those who lived in the "real," "civilized" parts of NA, and were simple
enough that scores could be computed by simple multiplication of numbers on a piece of paper.
N6TR came up with a FAR better scoring system for the Stew Perry contests -- it
was so good that ARRL wanted to adopt it, but as I heard it, Tree didn't want
to lose control of it so that someone could screw it up. I don't blame him a
bit. Tree's system is simple enough that the distance-based score for each QSO
is computed by the logging sofware and displayed in the log. The only thing the
logger can't do is give bonus credit for the TX power of the station you worked
-- that's done in log checking. And Tree's system is far from the only one that
could make sense, and that could easily be scored in real time by modern
logging software on almost any shack computer.
Unless or until the contesting "powers" that love the rules because the rules
favor them wakes up and decides that the rest of us deserve to be competitive, those of
us outside those favored population centers are going to vote with our feet and not take
these contests seriously. Those with bucks will continue to travel to islands where they
have a better shot at winning, and to build contesting stations in ME and VY2 so that
they can be closer to the mults in EU.
THAT'S why there's so little activity from so many countries in so many of
these contests, which makes it much less fun for the rest of us because we run
out of stations to work.
73, Jim K9YC
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