[CQ-Contest] Growing New Contesters with LOTW - suddenly it's 1977again

[Pete Smith]

At 09:55 AM 5/27/2008, Alfred Frugoli wrote:
>I do, however, see the possibility of things going the other way.  At least
>for ARRL sponsored contests, all electronic logs have to go through LOTW,
>with a special tag in the file that marks them as contest logs.  Then ARRL
>exports the contest data from LOTW and does their electronic massaging to
>get final scores.  CQWW could do the same.  The catch is that every entrant
>sending an electronic log would have to be signed up for LOTW and develop
>the skills to get their log encrypted and uploaded.  As we've seen from the
>initial rollout of LOTW, there is a fair amount of resistance to the signup
>process, especially in countries outside the US.
>
>I too hope that LOTW becomes more functional - I'd love to get my WAZ Award,
>which I have all the QSO's for through LOTW.  I just don't see any of this
>coming any time soon


I guess I should have expected this topic to devolve into another fruitless 
round of LOTW-bashing.

But seriously, guys -- with good will on both sides and a minimal 
additional effort, the way to implement this is to get the contest sponsors 
and LOTW to work together.  The contest sponsor has a file containing all 
cross-check-verified QSOs; how hard can it be to put that data in a format 
that LOTW can accept, and for LOTW to enter it in its database just like 
any other data transfer from another trusted server?

73, Pete N4ZR