[CQ-Contest] making lemonade (was: ARRL report on line scores decision)

Ron Notarius WN3VAW wn3vaw at fyi.net
Fri Jul 26 17:27:36 EDT 2002


The long lead times go back to the early days of most contests when all of
the logs were submitted on (horrors!) paper, including dupe sheets, and
hand-written to boot.  The long time lags were once required to give the
poor souls on the contest committees time to process (by hand) the logs and
assemble the summaries.

Given that the vast majority of us now use digital means to keep and submit
our contest logs, and given that some format standardization (ie CT, TRLog,
Cabrillo, etc. formats) can easily be mandated, which in turn implies that
more automation can be used to do some of the intial log comparisons... it
now seems obvious to conclude that the long lead times are no longer
neccesary for the vast majority.

I am not entirely comfortable with shaving the entry deadline from one month
to 15 days, though.  There are enough extenuating circumstances where I
could see some problems.  However, since we ought to be saving many months
in time between the easier methods of compiling the logs, and not having to
wait an additional 45 days between submission-to-printer, printing, and
mailing the magazine, I suggest we hold off on shaving the deadlines until
we see how much of an effect the other time savings has.

In short, if we give the committee a month past deadline to assemble and
post to the web the results (or is a month not enough now, guys?  Tell me if
I'm wrong), and we can have the final results two months after the contest
instead of six to eight months, isn't that good enough?

73, ron wn3vaw

"What's wrong with being an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our
time?"  --  Howard Beale

----- Original Message -----
To: swca at swbell.net
Cc: cq-contest at contesting.com
From: "Michael Keane, K1MK" <k1mk at arrl.net>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] making lemonade (was: ARRL report on line scores
decision)
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 09:31:19 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 26 July 2002, Mark Beckwith wrote:

> > I can't, for the life of me, figure out
> > why that should improve timeliness of result
> > delivery by more than 15 days.
>
> Um, web-based results?  Trey said:
>
> > 45 day lead time to publish articles in QST
>
> Now that QST results are history, there's another 45 days right
> there.

It's unclear to which date that 45 day lead time is measured relative.

The ad deadline for QST is something like 45 days prior to the date of
issue so it makes sense if that was the editorial deadline as well.

For some time contest results articles have been published to the Web
some 4 to 6 weeks prior to their date of issue i.e. results appearing in
September QST are on the Web site now.

So it's likely that most of the delay that could have been attributed to
that 45 day lead has already been history for a while.

Other than an understandable reluctance to freeze changes well in
advance of the deadline for going to production, was there ever anything
standing in the way of early release of results?

73,
Mike K1MK


Michael Keane K1MK
k1mk at arrl.net
________________________________________________
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