[CQ-Contest] PVRC Sweepstakes Forfeit

[James Nitzberg]

Hi Everyone;

By now, many of you may have heard that we(PVRC)
forfeited the 2006 Sweepstakes competition due to a
non-trivial amount of "Out of Circle" Activity.  

The response of the contesting community to this
decision has been overwhelmingly positive, and I truly
appreciate the time some of you have taken to express
your positive comments on PVRC taking the high road,
and recognizing that “winning” is only truly
satisfying if it is done correctly.

As with any big decision such as this, I have received
message from a few individuals that have their own
theories of “what really happened”, and in our case,
these theories are scattered pretty far away from the
truth!

Our reasons for forfeiting were much simpler than
folks might expect - we had a problem administering
our own membership participation circle.  It was never
an issue in prior years, in part because we were not
as competitive in ARRL events, particularly
Sweepstakes.

This year we were very competitive and we noticed that
a significant portion of our score, i.e. more than the
amount that put us in the #1 position, came from
outside of our 175 mile circle radius. This wasn't a
case of a few thousand points - it was substantial.

There are two important points here:

1. This problem was not caused by the ARRL, nor was it
the ARRL's responsibility in any way to catch it, or
fix it.

2. The individual PVRC operators/Members that led this
effort were NOT RESPONSIBLE for this situation!

This was purely a PVRC management issue – one that
required the PVRC Officers and Trustees to step back
and carefully examine where all of our activity was
coming from.  Once analyzed, our difficult decision to
forfeit became clear.  

I have spoken with Tom, KC1J from the ARRL several
times throughout this process, and I have found him to
be very professional and responsive to my questions.

I Hope this helps explain our situation.  We are
currently going through the difficult process of
carefully identifying our ARRL and CQ Club Competition
Circles.
   
In the final analysis, this is a case of PVRC doing
what is right for the contesting community (especially
for our worthy competition!), once the numbers were
carefully examined.

Our official Forfeit letter can be found on our web
site at:  

http://pvrc.org/2006_ss_gavel.html

73, 

Jim Nitzberg    WX3B
President, Potomac Valley Radio Club