[CQ-Contest] Why some Caribbean Islands compete as South America at CQWW and other contests

[Jim Brown]

On Mon,11/9/2015 8:13 AM, Ron Notarius W3WN wrote:
> If I'm not mistaken, the basic argument is that a station in "continental" South America, all else being equal, will always "lose" to a station in the "offshore/island" Caribbean station located within the SA continental boundaries.

The fundamental problem is that the guys in PY, LU, CX, and CE have the 
same competitive disadvantage by virtue of their location with respect 
to population centers as do we on the west coast of the USA, and those 
in VK/ZL, and in much of AS.

A contest scoring system based entirely on arbitrary (and very 
simplistic) rules like countries and continents, paying no attention to 
distance or geography, leaves out a LOT of hams that would like to 
compete but cannot. Such rules are DUMB in today's world -- they were 
designed half a century ago by those who lived in the "real," 
"civilized" parts of NA, and were simple enough that scores could be 
computed by simple multiplication of numbers on a piece of paper.

N6TR came up with a FAR better scoring system for the Stew Perry 
contests -- it was so good that ARRL wanted to adopt it, but as I heard 
it, Tree didn't want to lose control of it so that someone could screw 
it up. I don't blame him a bit. Tree's system is simple enough that the 
distance-based score for each QSO is computed by the logging sofware and 
displayed in the log. The only thing the logger can't do is give bonus 
credit for the TX power of the station you worked -- that's done in log 
checking. And Tree's system is far from the only one that could make 
sense, and that could easily be scored in real time by modern logging 
software on almost any shack computer.

Unless or until the contesting "powers" that love the rules because the 
rules favor them wakes up and decides that the rest of us deserve to be 
competitive, those of us outside those favored population centers are 
going to vote with our feet and not take these contests seriously. Those 
with bucks will continue to travel to islands where they have a better 
shot at winning, and to build contesting stations in ME and VY2 so that 
they can be closer to the mults in EU.

THAT'S why there's so little activity from so many countries in so many 
of these contests, which makes it much less fun for the rest of us 
because we run out of stations to work.

73, Jim K9YC