[CQ-Contest] Tigers roar....and get sleepy, too.

[Jim Idelson]

A lot more people would enter marathons if they were reduced to 10 miles.

K1AR makes the legitimate point that today's manual methods make it difficult 
to endlessly add categories and hand out a zillion more awards. But, I think 
the time has come for anyone to be able to manipulate contest results data in 
ways that go beyond the standard award categories. The ARRL on-line contest 
results database is a working engine that could easily be modified to sort 
scores into unofficial categories:  by hours operated, by SO2R or not, whatever 
you want using any information that can be collected in log submissions. What's 
the downside of that?

Since there's no direct revenue associated with contests and no real 
competition between contest sponsors, is there a reason ARRL wouldn't be open 
to some kind of arrangement that would allow a lot more contests to pump 
results into that database? Maybe ARRL wouldn't want to be burdened with extra 
work, so the best way would be to license the database tool to some outside 
group interested in making it work. Hook www.getscores.org into this, and now 
you're taking contest scoring to a new level.

Jim Idelson K1IR
email    k1ir at designet.com
web    http://www.k1ir.com