[CQ-Contest] Kill 0,1,2,3 and go for just 3 points

[Michael Adams]

I'll repeat two ideas I've shared every time the subject has come up the past few years:

Complex: If you wanted to make the scoring more "fair", in the sense of scoring contacts based on relative difficulty, some enterprising soul could mine the logs for the past solar cycle to measure the relative rarity of contacts by zone-pairs, by band, and assign Q points based on the results, with "easy" contacts getting 1 point, and "hard" contacts getting considerably more.   I'm sure, however, that the various logging software developers would "love" such a scheme.

Simple: A more modest tweak would be to go to a Q-scoring system of: (1 point for different DX) + (1 point for different zone) + (1 point for different continent), perhaps subdividing AS into two parts for scoring purposes to reflect the continent's size.  This would end the need for a Caribbean exception to the scoring rules and potentially alleviate some of the nominal scoring differences in NA vs EU, but it would come at the expense of shifting the CQWW balance further away from "DX Contest" and more towards "pure rate-fest" (which might or might not be a bad thing, depending on one's preferences).

Personally, I'm OK leaving well enough alone.  I'm more concerned in having fun and making as many Q's as I can (given geography and station), than I am in the score itself.  Just let me know who I'm allowed to work, and where to send the log.

-- 
Michael Adams | mda at n1en.org