[CQ-Contest] Ingenious prefixes and the RBN

[John Unger]

Gee, does this mean that folks will actually have to tune the radio, 
listen to the station, and copy the "ingenious" prefixes correctly 
rather than just clicking on a spot...:-)

73 - John, W4AU


On 4/18/2018 8:46 AM, N4ZR wrote:
>
> This may be old news to many of us, but VE3NEA's CW Skimmer Server 
> determines how "skeptical" to be about a callsign, based on a file of 
> all expected callsign patterns. This assessment in turn affects how 
> many repetitions of a callsign it must "hear" before issuing a spot.
>
> From time to time, this causes problems for contesters who have gone 
> out of their way to get a truly unique callsign for use in contests 
> like CQWPX.  For example, normal Belize callsigns are V31@@ (where @ 
> is an alphabetic wild card), but I have recently been told about the 
> issuance of a V3@ callsign for contest use.
>
> Revising the callsign pattern file in a truly systematic way involves 
> getting data from QRZ.COMon the number of "hits" for each callsign and 
> massaging the data with exotic techniques (exotic to me, anyway) to 
> turn callsigns into patterns and aggregate the numbers of hits to 
> determine how common the pattern is.  It's a lot of work.
>
> With a little time remaining before CQWPXCW, I'm offering an interim 
> fix.  If you have received what you believe to be a unique prefix and 
> have not used it before March, 2017 (the last systematic overhaul of 
> the pattern file) e-mail me by May 1 and I will incorporate the new 
> pattern in the RBN's pattern file distribution, which will be made 
> available to all RBN nodes by May 10.  I can't promise you that all 
> node-ops will download the new file before the contest, but the server 
> will at least "nag" them to do so.
>
>
> 73, Pete N4ZR
>
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