Interesting stuff Tor. Can we get a plot of the SSB top scores.
Obviously a year to year analysis is difficult to do - solar cycles
contribute to QSO count increases and decreases, geomag storms on a
weekend could do damage to a particular year, etc. Also, a top score
won't necessarily correlate activity given that Sweeps is a
geographically dependent contest and a lot of hams in certain geographic
areas may get on for a period that most benefits that operator and not
make his or her way into the top scorer's log.
The 2017 number is definitely down - lowest in a 20+ year period.
One thing that I have noticed is that the competition between PVRC and
NCCC is not as heated as it was 8 or 10 years ago. I think having an
additional 50 or 100 stations on from PVRC or NCCC did have an effect of
bumping up the numbers. PVRC numbers are up (107 in 2007 and 138 in
2008), but NCCC numbers are way down.
73 Rich NN3W
On 3/23/2018 2:51 PM, RT Clay wrote:
Yes, we don't have a number for "unique callsigns per year" (which ARRL might
have however). Maybe a good measure for this is the highest number of qsos reported by
any entrant, either single op or multi op. Some qsos are of course removed in log
checking in addition to not all unique calls being worked by any one station. But it is
probably still similar to the number of stations that were active in the contest. Some
time ago I went through the CW SS results available online and compiled these:
year highest # qsos
1995 1546
1996 1440
1997 1486
1998 1524
1999 1410
2000 1517
2001 1457
2002 1468
2003 1457
2004 1497
2005 1421
2006 1511
2007 1481
2008 1529
2009 1597
2010 1466
2011 1472
2012 1424
2013 1460
2014 1403
2015 1475
2016 1397
2017 1360
Comments:
1. the last two years are the lowest since at least 1995.
2. the peak was in 2009.
3. if you graph these (sorry I don't have a way to attach this), the trend you
see is either see an overall decline with fluctuations, or possibly roughly
flat behavior until 2010-2011 followed by a steeper decline.
Tor
N4OGW
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|