[CQ-Contest] Distance-Based Scoring

[Ward Silver]

 > Incentivising stations to beam to all parts of the world thereby
 > making it an all inclusive competition (after all it is called a 
worldwide
 > contest). There is nothing more frustrating in a contest than hearing
 > stations who cannot hear you because they are not beaming your way and
 > especially when they are forlornly calling CQ.

I made a proposal some years ago for a "coverage" contest that could be 
run as an overlay to any existing contest.  Extra points would be 
awarded based on the number of clock hours (0000-0059, 0100-0159, etc) 
in which you made a QSO with some designated area.  Let's take grid 
fields, perhaps: New Zealand populates the RE and RF grid fields.  For 
each clock hour during which I make an RE-field QSO (duplicate or not) 
on each band (6 band-QSOs available per clock hour) I get, say, 1000 points.

There are 18 x 18 grid fields (324 total) of which about 80 (based on a 
casual glance at a map - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System) could be active 
from land-based stations.  With 6 bands and 48 hours, that results in 
23,040 band-clock-field bonuses to ring up for 23 MEELYUN points.  Sound 
like fun?

All contacts could follow the CQ WW exchange rules, for example, and 
thus be perfectly valid for both the mainline contest and the coverage 
contest.  Dupes are snipped out by the log checking enzymes without 
penalty.  Grid fields could be available via a callbook lookup function 
or something like that.

We would then change from yelling, "What's your call?" to "What's your 
grid?" but that's a minor issue :-)

73, Ward N0AX