[CQ-Contest] Is there more to contesting ?

[Tim Makins, EI8IC]

Some idle thoughts, and a question to all those people that are a lot
cleverer than I am....

I was reading recently about the SETI project (Search for Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence) and about the mass number-crunching that they get up to in
order to find out if there's anyone contesting on Alpha Centuri or wherever.

And it occurred to me that while we are having all this fun operating and
contesting, couldn't the data WE generate be used by somebody to find
something out ????   More and more of the logs these days are done on
computer and emailed to a central point, so data-entry is no longer a
problem; if all the logs were number-crunched, wouldn't that begin to tell
us something we don't already know about propagation etc. ?????  Although
the reports exchanged are meaningless, the fact that most operators will
work someone in a contest as soon as they CAN suggests that the logs are a
useful guide to actual conditions and so can be compared with
propagation-predictions to show what really happened. And couldn't the data
be useful to show ideal band-changing and operating schedules etc. ??


Tim Makins, EI8IC, who's number-crunching capabilities are confined to :
QSO points x Multipliers = Final Score !


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