[CQ-Contest] Contest within a contest

[Bob Shohet, KQ2M]

Over the years, I have found that the greatest variability in path utility comes not from the distance involved, but rather how much of that path passes through the Northern auroral zone.

When geomagnetic cndx are quiet (A = 2 or less, K = 0)  VE6JY and KL7RA can run EU stations at EU sunrise on bands where I can’t even hear them.    But when cndx are disturbed ( A > 35 K > 4) they are in a “black hole” and I can still work some EU (though with difficulty), but the Southern W5’s  own the band.  And while K0SR might be equidistant from Europe compared to a Southern W5, his path certainly isn’t equivalent.

There will always be inequities in contest scoring and distance scoring is one way of addressing them, but I think that points scoring based on auroral path characteristics combined with distance might potentially be the fairest of all. 

73

Bob KQ2M


From: Denis Pochuev K7GK 
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2020 5:39 PM
To: cq-contest at contesting.com 
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Contest within a contest

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