[RTTY] Multipliers

[ve3iay at rac.ca]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 at 10:43:04 +0300, ZC4Li wrote:

> What about looking at Multipliers.
> 
> Why is it that in a lot of contests
> 
> W/JA/VK/ZL  Zero to 9  are mults
> 
> Why not  G/DL/TF/SP/F/LU/ etc
>                 Zero to 9 as mults also.
> 
> 
> 
> Or then again why not just have the DXCC list as mults.
> 

The BARTG, EA RTTY, SARTG and JARTS contests all use call areas in JA/VE/VK/W 
as multipliers. WAE adds several others (ZL, ZS, PY, UA9).

It appears that the idea was that people living in those countries were at a 
disadvantage relative to those in Europe who already have many easy multipliers 
available to them. This scheme gave people in other continents at least a few 
more local multipliers to shoot for.

Adding multipliers for numerical call "areas" in European countries, besides 
making the list of multipliers tremendously long, would benefit European (and 
nearby African and Asian) stations much more than those in more distant areas. 
Is European interest in these contests flagging so much that it needs a boost? 
It doesn't appear that way from here.

In fact, if anything, it would appear that one way to increase world-wide 
interest in these contests might be to add a few more "DX" countries to the 
list where the numeric identifier is a multiplier, e.g. ZL, ZS, PY, LU, UA9.

On  related topic: At one time, the number in all of these countries 
(JA/VE/VK/W) was a geographic identifier, and so having call area multipliers 
also made some sense as a means of dividing up geographically large countries. 
This is still true in some of those countries. However, it is not at all true 
in the US any more.

Some contests attempt to make up for this regulatory change in the US by asking 
stations to identify with their "geographical" call area (e.g. W6xxx/W2 for a 
station in NY or NJ), but quite frankly this is not working - there are more US 
stations who do not do this than who do, even in contests where the rules try 
to require it.

Frankly, it would probably be better for these contests to drop the geographic 
connection and simply accept "numeric" call areas in these countries, the way 
WAE does.

73,
Rich VE3IAY