[CQ-Contest] NAQP Multipliers

[David Pruett]

As one of the people who created the NAQP, I'd like to contibute a to this 
discussion concerning the rationale on multipliers in this contest.  While 
I would not presume to speak for the current contest administrators, I 
*did* admininster NAQP for the first several years of it's existance.  I 
was also on the ARRL Contest Advisory Committee when DC was added to the 
10M Contest.

I would submit that the contest sponsors generally have a strategy or 
objective for the contest, and they craft the rules accordingly.  For NAQP 
(which was intended to replace the ARRL Open CD Party) the criteria was 
"easy to participate".  We did not want complicated rules, and wanted to 
make it easy for people who casually encountered the contest on the air to 
join the fun.  That's why the exchange is your name; RST would have worked 
but name seemed a little more personal and got us away from the contester 
"5NN" stereotype.  For mults, since the contest was going to be NCJ 
sponsored we wanted to follow what the sprint had done.  However, the 
concept of "Canadian call areas" VE1-VE8 was already outdated in 1985, 
since VY1, VY2 and VE9 were already on the air.  How do you explain to a 
VE9 that he counts as VE1 when "Canadian call areas" were the multiplier 
criteria?  In the early years, we tried to make that work but eventually 
NAQP moved to "provinces" instead.

When it came to the USA, the obvious multiplier was "states".  Here we 
deviated from the Sprint in that Hawaii was counted as a mult.  This was 
pretty much an arbitrary decision - the team concensed that Hawaii's 
connection as a state trumped the fact that it was on the continent of 
Oceana (something I'm convinced non-hams fail to grasp).  As for including 
NA countries, this was a Sprint rule and seemed logical, plus it offered 
opportunities for low-impact DXpeditions to outlying areas like the 
Caribbean or for contesters on business in Mexico...

As for DX being a multiplier in the ARRL 10M contest, there is one reason 
for that: political pressure.  One person lobbied for DC as a mult and must 
have made a persuasive argument to somebody at ARRL HQ.

I'd also point out that in SS, there is a section called "Maryland-DC" and 
it's on-air abbreviation is supposed to be "MDC" not "MD".

My point is, in the end the rules are defined by the contest sponsor, and 
only their opinion counts...

Dave/K8CC