[CQ-Contest] Towards a critical examination of the 2-point rule in CQWW

[Kim Östman]

Dear Mike,

I agree that leaving out AF was quite an oversight on my part, thanks for
bringing it up. 

To see whether this really changes the situation I again looked at the
numbers. There are 77 AF country multipliers, which is a lot. However, AF is
an anomaly in the sense that a very large proportion of the countries are
rare DX that are hardly ever on the air. If one could argue that many NA/SA
multipliers are never on the air (a bad thing for the close-by z7/z8), then
this is doubly true for AF (a bad thing for the close-by EU zones).

Anyway, for an accurate data-based comparison let's look at the AF
multipliers in the top SOAB HP CQWW CW logs from 2012:

Zone 8 (NA): 13 worked countries, 41 country multipliers in total on all
bands
Zone 9 (SA): 11 worked countries, 52 country multipliers in total on all
bands
Zone 14 (EU): 14 worked countries, 58 country multipliers in total on all
bands
Zone 15 (EU): 16 worked countries, 57 country multipliers in total on all
bands
Zone 33 (AF): 15 worked countries, 48 country multipliers in total on all
bands

Interestingly enough, the best z9 station worked more AF multipliers than
the station based in AF itself! 

Based on these numbers, it is not a game-changer that would alter the
"multipliers" argument.

73
Kim



-----Original Message-----

I stopped reading this when you lumped NA and SA to make up for the 
number of EU countries.   EU is nearly 4 million sq miles while NA alone 
is nearly 10 million Sq miles.

What happens to the multipliers when you lump in Africa with EU, which 
to me is the same as lumping in SA with NA.

CQ WW will never be scored "fairly" from a geographic standpoint. Why do 
people go to PJ and 9Y land?  for 3 pointers plain and simple.  If there 
were more 3 point Caribbean islands you would see more of them activated.

Some randomly drawn lines created these imbalances.

Mike W0MU