[CQ-Contest] CW SS: Some thoughts

[Richard F. DiDonna NN3W]

Interesting stuff Tor.  Can we get a plot of the SSB top scores. 
Obviously a year to year analysis is difficult to do - solar cycles 
contribute to QSO count increases and decreases, geomag storms on a 
weekend could do damage to a particular year, etc. Also, a top score 
won't necessarily correlate activity given that Sweeps is a 
geographically dependent contest and a lot of hams in certain geographic 
areas may get on for a period that most benefits that operator and not 
make his or her way into the top scorer's log.

The 2017 number is definitely down - lowest in a 20+ year period.

One thing that I have noticed is that the competition between PVRC and 
NCCC is not as heated as it was 8 or 10 years ago.  I think having an 
additional 50 or 100 stations on from PVRC or NCCC did have an effect of 
bumping up the numbers.  PVRC numbers are up (107 in 2007 and 138 in 
2008), but NCCC numbers are way down.

73 Rich NN3W

On 3/23/2018 2:51 PM, RT Clay wrote:
> Yes, we don't have a number for "unique callsigns per year" (which ARRL might have however). Maybe a good measure for this is the highest number of qsos reported by any entrant, either single op or multi op. Some qsos are of course removed in log checking in addition to not all unique calls being worked by any one station. But it is probably still similar to the number of stations that were active in the contest. Some time ago I went through the CW SS results available online and compiled these:
>
> year  highest # qsos
> 1995	1546
> 1996	1440
> 1997	1486
> 1998	1524
> 1999	1410
> 2000	1517
> 2001	1457
> 2002	1468
> 2003	1457
> 2004	1497
> 2005	1421
> 2006	1511
> 2007	1481
> 2008	1529
> 2009	1597
> 2010	1466
> 2011	1472
> 2012	1424
> 2013	1460
> 2014	1403
> 2015	1475
> 2016	1397
> 2017	1360
>
> Comments:
>
> 1. the last two years are the lowest since at least 1995.
> 2. the peak was in 2009.
> 3. if you graph these (sorry I don't have a way to attach this), the trend you see is either see an overall decline with fluctuations, or possibly roughly flat behavior until 2010-2011 followed by a steeper decline.
>
> Tor
> N4OGW
>
>