[CQ-Contest] Encouraging Casual Participation in Contests

[Trent Sampson]

The DARC system has done precisely this for several years. 

All DARC contest logs are accepted as QSO proof for the DARC Awards programme 

"Contest is more than 59 - that is known especially by award hunters. With more than 2000 active German stations in WAG there be not many DL-awards for which WAG does not allow for additional valuable contacts. And DARC's online QSO database and QSLing system DCL (DARC Community Logbook) allows for paperless application for about 30 German awards. DCL also shows you your personal score for each of the available awards based on your QSOs in DARC contests (which are imported after crosscheck) and QSOs you have added via adif."

http://dcl.darc.de/~dcl/public/index.php

This was used as a partial model for the Wireless Institute of Australia (WIA) Awards Programme that accepts LOTW and EQSL Confirmations as well as traditional hard copy. As yet direct contest QSOs have not been included.

http://www.wiaawards.com/

Regards

Trent VK4TS





-----Original Message-----
From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Tim Shoppa
Sent: Thursday, 27 April 2017 3:53 AM
To: cq-contest at contesting.com; Pete Smith N4ZR
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Encouraging Casual Participation in Contests

Pete writes:
> There is a reasonably simple and straight-forward way to encourage 
> more
of this, potentially
> yielding more people for us to work. We need interconnection between 
> CQ
and ARRL contest
> databases, so that any contact that is in both stations' log in a 
> given
contest can be claimed for
> ARRL and CQ award credit without going through the QSL card process.

> I'm not underestimating the programming effort involved, I hope, but
surely some
> combination of volunteer and professional staff involvement can get it
done. It could start
> small - perhaps a pilot involving the CQWW open log database and DXCC.
Imagine the
> value added to LOTW if it were the hub for this process, and the
potential increase in
> DXCC fees. Surely, this is a win-win proposition.

For a little while in the 1960's or 1970's, the ARRL DXCC desk would give you DXCC credit for a ARRL DX contest QSO if you gave them the QSO details and they still had the DX's paper contest log available to cross-verify. So there is some precedent for this. Although they discontinued this ability probably due to the PITA of keeping paper contest logs around.

The majority of high-volume contesters use LOTW today so I'm not really sure it's necessary.

There are even spotting clusters that will tag known LOTW users with [LOTW]. I wonder if CQ log statistics could show that LOTW users work more weak-ass in-search-of-DXCC-credit callers than the non-LOTW users.

Tim N3QE
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