[CQ-Contest] Its not the Sunspots folks

[Eric Gruff]

Since the exchange is zones, why not make "DX" a contact between different
zones or countries? It doesn't completely level the playing field, but at
least the US, Asia and Russia can work geographically-distant stations in
the same country for points. The exchange to verify this is already there,
so it would simply be a scoring change. I'll leave it to others to decide
how many points, etc.

Nothing can be done to make every QTH exactly equal to every other QTH, no
matter what. If you live near the intersection of several zones in populated
areas, such as there are in Europe, you 're going to have an advantage. If
you are on the West Coast, you have an advantage to the Pacific Rim, but
Europe can be almost non-existent (like this past weekend), etc. In my
opinion, it's more the boredom factor - I shut the radio off around midnight
local time (0700Z) as there were almost no new stations to work on 80 or 40
M, and those were the only bands open beyond NVIS for me. Had I been able to
work Zones 4 and 5 in the USA for points, I would likely have stayed on. It
wouldn't have led to me winning anything, but I would have enjoyed it.

I know that any big change like this will completely mess up comparison of
scores to previous years, and I'm not sure how to answer that point, other
than to note that with the powerful software that is now common, a
before/after rules change score could be easily calculated.

Just my $0.02,

Eric NC6K


Message: 1
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2016 22:50:19 -0600
From: W0MU Mike Fatchett <w0mu at w0mu.com>
To: cq-contest at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Its not the Sunspots folks
Message-ID: <dacd7cda-d584-35cf-673a-ca6b30baf2a7 at w0mu.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

What is DX?  Europe is country rich, similar to the US states. They get
1 point for working all those countries which are smaller than many or most
of our western states.

If we define DX as 2000 plus miles ok.

I would be fine not getting any points for working stations in Colorado and
one point for all other states.  It is nearly identical to Europe.

The USA is Republic made up of individual states.  Not much different than
the European Union.

We contest for fun.  Not a whole lot of fun happened in NA.  I could find
spots on 20m every day that never happens.

W0MU

On 11/1/2016 7:05 PM, Ed Sawyer wrote:
> W0MU asked:  "Why does the USA always get "punished"?" in the CQ WW
Contest.
>
>   
>
> Answer: Because it's a DX contest!  A better question is, why are we 
> all forced to work a station in our country just to get country credit 
> for our own country?  Wouldn't it be way more efficient to just get 
> automatic credit for our country and zone?
>
>   
>
> The point of CQ WW DX - That's "World Wide DX"-  is to seek out and work
DX.
> Its not to fill up the log with domestic Qs.  There are plenty of 
> contests all year long to do that.
>
>   
>
> 73
>
>   
>
> Ed  N1UR
>
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