[CQ-Contest] CQ Update

[Ed Muns]

The scoring technology is excellent.  3500 CQ WPX RTTY logs were completely
checked in about 15 minutes on an garden-variety PC.  85% of all QSOs
cross-checked, calls busted that are off by two characters, all the scores
listings and tables for the magazine article properly formatted, etc.
However, hundreds of volunteer hours are put into manually correcting logs
for Cabrillo errors, wrong band, wrong date/time, wrong sent callsign, etc.
Running further tests and analysis to detect and validate cheating takes
many more volunteer hours.  Its this manual labor that takes a couple months
of calendar time by unpaid volunteers to get the logs straightened out so
the log check software can run with credible results.

There's not much manual labor in submitting a contest log to the robot after
the contest.  Five days is more than enough time.  Moreover, if individuals
would look over their log during those five days and correct the formatting
errors, the subsequent log checking time could decrease with less time spent
by others cleaning up the logs.

Ed W0YK


Rudy, N2WQ, wrote:
> Does this also mean that the results will be available and 
> published much quicker? Not much use of technology if it's 
> not applied to scoring as well.