[CQ-Contest] Contest within a contest

Mon Mar 16 17:39:49 EDT 2020

Tor,

Yes, inequities within the zones are a problem. I'm quite familiar with it, though in a different context, having contested from the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area, both at the western edge of Zone 3. You simply cannot compete with Arizona from any of those locations in a DX contest.

The main motivations for the scheme I proposed are the overlooked inequities in distance-based scoring. Those are glaring. For instance, let's take Vienna as the proxy for Europe, roughly in its geographical center, even though such center is somewhere near the Slovak-Ukrainian border. Seattle, Dallas and Miami are roughly equidistant from Vienna, using the great circle distance as the measure. I think it's pretty obvious that the difficulty of a contact for those 3 paths varies greatly, pretty much regardless of the band.

One cannot assume that distance-based scoring will make things fair. It will simply will replace one set of inequities with another.

Denis - K7GK/6

________________________________
From: CQ-Contest <cq-contest-bounces+k7gk=hotmail.com at contesting.com> on behalf of RT Clay <rt_clay at bellsouth.net>
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2020 8:50 AM
To: cq-contest at contesting.com <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Contest within a contest

Denis,

I think your scoring scheme has a critical flaw:  the points for each qso depend on basically arbitrary zone boundaries, and the zone boundaries in some cases divide up countries with lots of entries (like the USA). For example, a station on the western edge of zone 5 would get 3 points for working Europe in zone 14. A station one mile away in the eastern part of zone 4 gets 4 points for the same contact.

The IARU contest also has this problem because of the 1 point/3 points for same/different zones. I live in western zone 8 close to zone 7. There are many more zone 8 stations active than zone 7 stations in IARU. If I was just a little further west my score would go up significantly.

Tor N4OGW

On Sunday, March 15, 2020, 9:13:56 PM CDT, Denis Pochuev K7GK <k7gk at hotmail.com> wrote:

I have outlined an alternative scoring proposal for CQWW quite some time ago in our club's newsletter. It is mostly distance-based and doesn't require any changes to the exchange or additional grid square information.

Details are here (pages 13-17): http://nccc.cc/jug/2016/07Jul2016.pdf

I would be interested to hear opinions about this scoring scheme.

73, Denis - K7GK/6
P.S. It still doesn't address the issue of the UBNs not being available to the scorers of contest-within-contest.

________________________________
From: CQ-Contest <cq-contest-bounces+k7gk=hotmail.com at contesting.com> on behalf of Richard F DDonna NN3W <richnn3w at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2020 6:53 AM
To: k5zd at charter.net <k5zd at charter.net>
Cc: ko7ss at yahoo.com <ko7ss at yahoo.com>; CQ-Contest Reflector <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Contest within a contest

WPX is kind of one of the only contests where you could do scoring on grid
locator.  And even then, not so reliably.  Behavior in contests is very
much points driven, and contesters make very strategic decisions based on
maximizing points.  In WPX, 40 SSB from the midwest and east is a gold mine
when antennas are pointed towards EU.  How you would score based on
distance could be quite different given that from New England, stations in
California aren't a heck of a lot closer than a station in the UK.  But for
now, that UK station is worth 6 points versus 1 point for California.

73 Rich NN3W

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 12:35 PM <k5zd at charter.net> wrote:

> The grid-locator has not been removed from the CQ WW and WPX public logs.
> Not all logs included this information, but for those that did, it appears
> in their public log.
>
> The grid-locator information was just added to the contest submissions
> (and to the Cabrillo spec) in 2019.
>
> Randy K5ZD
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: CQ-Contest <cq-contest-bounces+k5zd=charter.net at contesting.com> On
> Behalf Of ko7ss--- via CQ-Contest
> Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2020 2:35 AM
> To: Reflector Cq-contest <cq-contest at contesting.com>
> Subject: [CQ-Contest] Contest within a contest
>
> On 3/13/2020 01:01 PM, Edward Sawyer wrote:
>
> "your groups would be better served by using the contest weekend
> assignment and exchange and basic scoring rules as an "open source"
> activity. Sponsor your own contest within a contest that operates during
> the weekend and interfaces with the existing contesters but have your own
> set of rules. Enter as checklogs to the sponsors and see if the sponsors
> will provide all the logs to you for your own scoring and cross checking"
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> This is a very interesting idea. The CQWW and CQ WPX public logs are
> already available in Cabrillo format, the ARRL DX logs in non Cabrillo
> format.
>
> It would be interesting to see distance based scoring applied to the CQWW
> and ARRL DX contests. Most interesting would be the CQ WPX with 1 point Q X
> mults scoring.
>
> The W3KM Cabrillo evaluator could be used (?) to rescore the top 50 logs
> in each category. The only problem is the Maidenhead grid square has been
> removed from the public logs for "privacy reasons", even though a grid
> square is 500 sq miles in size.
>
> A website Realcontestscores.com could be set up.
>
> Maybe the Top Ten results would all be the same. Maybe not.
>
> Maybe when a few sunspots come back no one will care that coastal W1/2/3's
> dominate the Top Ten. For now though I am considering hiring a social media
> PR firm to promote my 2 hour 20M EU opening on 20M, Watch out W1/Maine, I'm
> coming for you next year!
>
> 73, Bill KO7SS in Arizona
>
>
>
>
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