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

Tue Nov 10 13:21:04 EST 2015

I don't know Rich if this is exactly correct your remarks "those who won 
then (under a traditional system) would continue to have won under 
distance based format." How do we know this? Before we have others 
leaping on to grand sweeping fallacy let me at least prove this is 
false.  Just compare two contests on the same band, i.e., the ARRL 160 
Meter contest and the Stew Perry Top Band Distance Challenge. Rule are 
slanted against the Caribbean Territories so they could never win or 
even make the top ten, period. In comparison the Stew Perry TBDC gives 
some equity to stations off shore at some distance away.  Stations in 
South America, and the Caribbean fighting through the tropical QRN  can 
make a good show.  I've ask this question again and again without any 
answer from those nabobs at the ARRL Contest regime:  Why do you allow a 
contest like the ARRL 160 to exist when a station in the U.S. Virgin 
Islands can never win wherein a station in the British Virgin, a few 
miles away, could easily win with any good effort? They are most 
noticeably silent on that.  I am not sure but VP2VI was President of the 
ARRL when the rules were set up. However, To Bob's credit at first it 
was going to be a Sweepstakes for 160 but amid his protests they 
included DX but deliberately or not did not include the American 
Territories as DX.  This was and ivy covered New England way of doing 
things for those close to and in with those at HQ and their cronies to 
enjoy.  Decades on attempts have resulted in statements from the CAC 
that they can only consider things they are "tasked" to do by insiders. 
These insiders are not contest people at all but those who work in 
Newington. There is more to this story but I will spare you because 
perhaps you already know it.

Herb Schoenbohm, KV4FZ

On 11/10/2015 12:32 PM, Richard F DiDonna NN3W wrote:
> I believe that at some point in the past, someone did an analysis of 
> what would happen to a past contest if the scoring metric was changed 
> from the current scoring format (I believe it was a CQWW contest, but 
> it may have been an ARRL DX test) to a distance based scoring metric.  
> IIRC, for the most part, those who won then (under a traditional 
> system) would continue to have won under distance based format.  One 
> or two "out of the blue" entrants cracked the "box", but the winners 
> were still, by and large, the winners.
>
> Now, that is hindsight, and behaviors change based upon the rules, but 
> I have to agree with Kelly, that if you can't work/hear the DX in the 
> first place, you are only going to gain so many points when the 
> marginal band or path does open.
>
> 73 Rich NN3W
>
> On 11/10/2015 10:23 AM, Kelly Taylor wrote:
>> Hello Jim,
>>
>> First off, let me assure you I have the greatest respect for your 
>> technical prowess and appreciate all your efforts to help anyone who 
>> asks.
>>
>> However, I respectfully disagree on the merits of distance-based 
>> scoring.
>>
>> How does distance-based scoring do anything other than swap one 
>> unlevel playing field for another?
>>
>> Consider:
>> It’s 7 a.m. Sunday morning and K5ZD is running 3,500-mile QSOs into 
>> Europe at 200/hr when you can’t even tell Europe is on the band? You 
>> get more per Q when Europe finally opens to the Bay Area, but are you 
>> going to work them at the same rate?
>>
>> It’s at virtually any time during the contest and P40V is cranking 
>> through 300/hr with 5,000-mile distant Europeans and 10,000-mile 
>> distant Asians, Oceanics and VU2s. All of whom are as loud to him as 
>> W6YX is to you.
>>
>> It’s late Saturday night and you’re on 80. As you tune across the 
>> band from your Winnipeg location, you hear K5ZD, NQ4I, P40V, and a 
>> hundred other stations working, at high rate, stations you can’t even 
>> tell are on the band. So you plug away at working Americans, knowing 
>> your QSOs are worth half the distance or less. If you’re lucky, 
>> you’ll beat the pileup of Europeans you can’t hear and work the odd 
>> Aruba-Bonaire-Curaçao station.
>>
>> The fallacy of distance-based scoring is it begins with the 
>> supposition everybody has access to the same distant stations, or 
>> would, if they had a big enough station. But that’s just not true. 
>> There’s a reason the Black Hole is called the place RF goes to die. 
>> And even when we can work Europe, we rarely drill down more than the 
>> first couple of layers. On 80 and 40, we’re pretty much limited to 
>> the odd superstation.
>>
>> In the U.S., the Northeastern stations will always have more access 
>> to more Europeans than you have access to PacRim stations. For those 
>> in the centre of the continent, stations around the perimeter 
>> (K1,2,3,4,5,6,7, VE1, 9, VY2 and VO1) will always have access to 
>> greater-distance Qs, often with stations barely, if at all, audible 
>> to you. And stations such as P40V and HC8N will always have more 
>> access to EVERYBODY than you or I could ever hope to have.
>>
>> The reason a VE4 log in WW is predominantly American is that, while 
>> each QSO is fewer points, at least it’s someone...
>>
>> In the end, WW results wouldn’t change much, if at all, under 
>> distance-based scoring.
>>
>> The scoring model for the Stew Perry is interesting, but it doesn’t 
>> help many stations in the least.
>>
>> In VE4 we accept our lot and still try to have as much FUN as we can. 
>> We don’t predicate fun on winning. Because it says here if a VE4 ever 
>> wins WW, it will only be because massive tectonic activity turned 
>> Winnipeg into an oceanside community.
>>
>> 73, kelly
>> ve4xt
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Nov 10, 2015, at 12:42 AM, Jim Brown <k9yc at audiosystemsgroup.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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
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