[CQ-Contest] Open Letter to VE Contesters

[Kelly Taylor]

Jim,

Those are all excellent points. One thing, though, is it suggests the Canadian sub-bands (lack thereof, really), isn't really a core issue. 

Your fixes would fix a lot for a bunch of folks. 

I can't help but wonder if the subconscious issue, one that some perhaps can't recognize, let alone admit to, is that the NE US and eastern seaboard had for some time a major advantage over most of W/VE and now some of those operators can't abide by two of their own finding a way to overcome that advantage. 

The difference between US and Canadian regulations would thus be merely the scapegoat. 

73, kelly, ve4xt 


Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 24, 2016, at 10:43 PM, Jim Brown <k9yc at audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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
> 
> 
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