[CQ-Contest] Analysis on ASSISTED advantage vs UNASSISTED

[Gary Sutcliffe]

>
>I had 2800 QSOs and 950 mults in WPX SSB SOAB unassisted. I was wondering
>how many more mults I would have worked with packet. David was kind to let
>me have his nice database of all the nearly 30 000 spots from that weekend.
>
>I found that there were good spots of about 350 prefixes that I did not
>work. Looking at them I could clearly say that I could have worked at 100 of
>them with ease had I known their frequency and were to turn the antenna.
>With SO2R you don't just find all of them even if you tune across them.
>
>
>And I guess this holds true in most of the contests...


Thanks for sharing your analysis with us Tonno.  I did something similar 
with the ARRL 10M Contest a few years ago.  I will sometimes operate packet 
assisted in  contests that have a category for it, depending on my goals 
and how I feel about a given contests. Using packet in the ARRL 10M puts 
you into the multi operator category so I never  use it there.

In that particular year I was able to get a listing of all the spots from 
the local cluster sysop.  I went through them an found that there were less 
than 10 multipliers that I missed that I felt I would have had a shot at 
had I been packet assisted. This was with a mixed mode entry where you get 
multiplier credit for a state/country for each mode.

I think that there are two reasons for the difference in our findings.

1. There are fewer multipliers available relative to the number of stations 
worked. compared to WPX.  An extreme example of this would be SS. A serious 
effort will automatically get you close a clean sweep without the use of 
packet.

2. A contest like the 10M contest gives you less ground to cover compared 
to a multiband effort, increasing the likelihood of running into a given 
station that is the only one on that will give you that multiplier.

There  has been a lot of discussion on why packet assisted stations do not 
usually do as well as unassisted stations. I think that packet can be an 
advantage in some contests if used properly.  It is all to easy to give up 
a good run when some juicy spots come by, which is a mistake.

Thanks again for your interesting analysis.


Gary Sutcliffe  W9XT

Unified Microsystems
w9xt at qth.com
www.qth.com/w9xt