[CQ-Contest] Level Playing Field - my 2 cents

[Michael Tope]

Tom, you are absolutely correct. Working West Africa from out here in 
6-land is a piece of cake even though we are much further away than the 
east coast. Northern Europe is a totally different even though it is 
physically closer than West Africa. The only way you could make distance 
based scoring anywhere close to being fair would be to come up with some 
sort of auroral-zone weighted distance factor. That has its own pitfalls 
since the auroral zone moves around a bit and its impact is variable 
depending on solar activity.

BTW, big antennas and a advantageous QTH don't seem to be the only 
ingredient. Granted this is coming from the perspective of a pretty 
casual contester, but I've noticed there are some big stations on the 
east coast that don't seem to be competitive with the perennial top 
scoring stations especially in the Multi-Multi category. There is 
clearly more to it than just getting lots of aluminum up high in the air.

73, Mike W4EF/6......


On 6/29/2011 6:15 PM, Tom W8JI wrote:
> This is how well thought out this has been. W9RE is around 300 miles closer
> to Germany than I am. I have vastly better propagation, but would get an
> edge over Mike.
>
> Why would anyone want that?
>
> The path direction and what is in that path, like the magnetic poles, is
> more important than the raw distance. There certainly are case where
> distance matters, but K3LR is about the same distance as northern W0 land
> from the middle of Europe, and there is no comparison at all in propagation.
>
> I think the real goal here is to diminish the advantage of the east coast's
> (I hardly call WPa east coast) better PATH to Europe.
>
> I'm not sure how to compensate for better paths in scoring, or if we should.
> If we do it by distance, we might as well add a multiplier for being in the
> south. The poor saps way up north and in the midwest are going to get
> stiffed by a distance penalty, and they have it a whole lot tougher than
> anyone else.
>
>
>> Approximate distances to Germany:
>>
>> Ma     3800
>> WPa (K3LR)  4150
>> Mn        4400
>> Wi        4400
>> IL        4500
>> Mid GA 4700
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