[CQ-Contest] RDXC Entry Reclassified to High Power

[Jim Brown]

On Wed,10/5/2016 3:01 PM, James Cain wrote:
> Doing away with power categories would solve this problem. Just list everybody in order by score in the contest results and that's that.

Yeah, throw the baby out with the bath water.

Several years ago, I was warned by a top CA contester about the 
organizers of this contest with their arbitrary rulings and lousy rules 
(he lost a bunch of Qs, allegedly because other stations blew his 
exchange). I've never bothered to participate.

As to using RBN for things like this -- there are simply too many 
variables to establish relative operating power. Among them are 
antennas, what direction they are pointed, their horizontal AND vertical 
patterns based on height, band conditions, including QSB, time of day, 
and so on.

I've used RBN to evaluate MY antennas, but I knew what they were, made a 
lot of TEST transmissions on both antennas, using a different call for 
each antenna, QSYing between each, and interleaving calls on one antenna 
with calls on the other, taking as much data as I could get from the 
same RX site, putting it in a spreadsheet and plotting DB readings from 
the same RX station for both antennas, and plotting dB vs distance. 
Under those controlled conditions, I got quite usable data. Nothing like 
this could have worked for the RDXC "investigation."

73, Jim K9YC