[CQ-Contest] Open Letter to VE Contesters

[Jim Brown]

On Wed,2/24/2016 6:26 PM, Ken Widelitz wrote:
> Of course the West coast isn't going to come close to the East coast in a DX contest.

That depends ENTIRELY on scoring rules.  We has hams have gotten used to 
the definition of a DX contest as one where number of contacts is 
multiplied by number of multipliers, and the ONLY multipliers are 
countries. Simple scoring rules of that sort made sense when the only 
computers available to us were pencil and paper doing simple addition 
and multiplication.

But those simple-minded rules make NO SENSE today, thanks to wide 
disparities in the geographical distribution of hams, the geographical 
distribution and size of countries, and the VERY different propagation 
conditions between hams in various parts of the world and those 
population centers.  Modern computers make practical the computation of 
all sorts of distance-based scoring rules, or of definitions of 
multipliers other than a "country."

For all practical purposes in contests, Asia rarely provides more than a 
dozen or so countries, OC rarely more than a half dozen, and the 
distance to those countries from W6/W7 is significantly greater than 
from the eastern seaboard to EU and AF.  The only significant activity 
in AS and OC is JA.

How would you like it if the European Union was a single multiplier? 
That's our condition with China (much of a continent), VK (an entire 
continent), Russia (much of two continents), and Japan (often 40% of the 
Qs in a west coast log).

If we must insist on the concept of multipliers with no distances, I 
propose that JA prefectures be multipliers, along with states in VK and 
BY. That would be very easy to do -- they're already numbered. Oh -- but 
we can't do that, it would be different, and make it impossible to 
compare current scores with historical ones. BS -- spotting networks, 
Skimmer, automated messages, SO2R, automated dupe checking have already 
done that, in spades!

The REAL reason for resistance to this sort of change is like with any 
other privileged group -- they don't want to give up their massive 
advantage!  You (Ken) have the advantage of a very short hop to EU and 
bands that are open a lot more than for most others. Those with contest 
stations in the Caribbean have the continental multiplier in some 
contests, and a short water path to all the major ham population centers 
except JA.

But what about the thousands of little guys you big guns want to work, 
who can't afford to rent a station and fly there? Don't they get to have 
fun too?

73, Jim K9YC