[CQ-Contest] 2009 CQWW CW participation figures and logs accuracy

[Stan]

Hi

I was trying to figure out how many stations took part in the last CQWW CW and found some interesting figures.

CQWW 2009 CW contains a total of 3.870.544 QSOs extracted from 5514 logs. Total number of unique callsigns is 62.012. The question is how many mistakes do we make on average when copying callsigns.

If every 1/100th QSO has a mistake in callsign, this means 38.705 "fake" unique calls in logs, or potentially 23.307 "true" unique calls (62.012-38.705).

To get the accurate number of unique calls the programme had to count callsigns that are found in at least 10 logs. So here it is.

Below are unique calls count based on number of entires found in logs:

QSOS IN LOGS  ---  CALLS
============================
More than 8000    1 (HC8GR)
More than 7000    3 (LX7I, DR1A, CR3L)
More than 6000    6 (etc...)
More than 5000    16
More than 4000    41
More than 3000    71
More than 2000    139
More than 1000    554
More than 900    149
More than 800    173
More than 700    212
More than 600    286
More than 500    334
More than 400    489
More than 300    632
More than 200    1076
More than 100    2061
More than 90    374
More than 80    371
More than 70    414
More than 60    507
More than 50    571
More than 40    791
More than 30    1007
More than 20    1456
More than 10    2509
Less than 10    47742

Let’s assume that that station that were not found in at least 10 logs are either fakes or as a minimum not real contesters. If we ignore them, we can say that in 2009 there were 14243 hams who took part in CQWW CW.

If we follow the same assumption we can also say that some 47.742 stations either made less than 10 QSOs or most likely were incorrectly received callsigns.

As an example have a look at how many different variants of 5B/G4IRN found their way into contesters logs (number of QSOs in brackets):

5B/G3IRN (7), 5B/G4ERN (1), 5B/G4IAN (1), 5B/G4IFN (2), 5B/G4IGN (1), 5B/G4IR (2), 5B/G4IRN (1316), 5B/G4IRT (2), 5B/G4SRN (1), 5B4/G4IRN (10).

And finally, out of about 14.243 stations that took part in the contest, 5.514 sent their logs, which is less than 40% of participants.

Above figures are taken from CQWW Analyser stats (http://www.ei6dx.com/cqww-contest-analysis/).

73 de Stan