Others have already predated my memories of 3830, which go back to the late
1980s when operating at W3LPL. As soon as the clock hit 0000Z on Sunday night,
we would start packing up the TS-830s we brought to Frank's place and someone
would put the 80M position on 3830.
Someone (often me, because I was doing the PVRC newsletter and would include
the scores) would scribble down the scores as we waited to see how we did
against the N2/K1 competition. Month's later the scores would show up in the
old folded letter sized paper NCJ...
Later on I did a "Digital Contesting" or something like that column for NCJ and
Internet email starting to become ubiquitous - well, in use a lot by those in
technical fields. I (WB2EKK at the time) put together an contester Internet
email list and George WB5VZL and Trey WN4KKN put together what became the start
of CQ-CONTEST.
I did what the Japanese call the "long QRX" between the mid 1990s and 2009 or
so, as family and work took over life. When I got back on 3830scores.com was
there and amazing - and gotten so much more amazing since then, kudos to WA7BNM.
Since QST stopped printing line scores, 3830 is the first and often only place
most people see their scores in comparison to anyone else.
If you bicycle or run, you probably use the Strava web site, which is kind of
the 3830scores for competitive racing that has filtered down to the more casual
runners/cyclists who like to track their times. The major difference is Strava
takes essentially the ".adif file" as input. vs. just ride summary data, and
produces all kinds of statistics under a "freemium" model.
As NCJ looks at electronic distribution, Strava would be a good model to
explore.
73 John K3TN
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