[CQ-Contest] Appropriate wait time for contest results?

[Jim Brown]

On Tue,4/4/2017 11:50 AM, Stu Phillips wrote:
> I’m curious what folks think is an appropriate time to wait for contest results?
>
> The wait time is all over the map:
>
> - NAQP’s – preliminary results published in small number of weeks, definitive around 4 months or so
> - ARRL contests – seem still to be driven by the print schedule of QST and around 6 months
> - CQ Magazine contests (WW & WPX) – claimed results a couple of weeks, definitive seem about a year
> - State QSO Parties – no normal value – one to several months
> - Others – weeks to years

Several issues at play. First is that some contest sponsors rely on 
volunteers and have limited resources. CQ is struggling to stay afloat 
as a business, and volunteers are doing their best to address cheating 
by some competitors. I have no idea what the issues are at ARRL, but 
it's public knowledge that their operation was in trouble due to 
personnel issues for a while and has improved significantly in the last 
year or so.

I'm a member of NCCC, the club that runs the California QSO Party, which 
typically draws 900+ logs. I've never been involved in that work, but 
Stu has, and he's been part of a team that has greatly streamlined the 
process of log checking. That process involved the work by several 
members with expertise in programming who wrote a lot of code to greatly 
speed up the process, while also doing better cross-checking of logs. 
Last I heard, CQP log checking was complete within a few months, with 
plaques and certificates in the mail within 4-5 months.

It may also be that some of the administrators producing slow results 
are stuck with old methods and rejecting help from younger folks 
offering to bring them into the 21st century.

There's also the matter of logs being submitted in a form that require 
the contest administrator to "fix" them. 2016 was the first year that 
NCCC stopped accepting paper logs for CQP. Before that, volunteers had 
to type those logs into the system, one QSO at a time.

73, Jim K9YC