Topband: DX Window-Redux

[Shoppa, Tim]

> There is a person down here always complaining about contest life being 
> unfair, and wanting distance based multipliers in other contests. He wanted 
> support for that idea.
> [...]
> The end result of distance based scoring or score by distance, power, and 
> number of QSO's is certainly very different, but it is far from level. It 
> simply tilts things in a different way.
> [...]
> It winds up effectively being a "northern polar path" or "southern polar 
> path", and unpopulated one-hop radial area penalty.

The concept of a "completely level playing field contest" is an interesting one.

There were several contests in the 1960's that attempted to level the playing
field for all participants worldwide.

These contests very often ended up with tables of multipliers based on CQ zones
that attempted to give bonus points/mults for the most difficult contacts, e.g.
over the pole. Check out for example page 57 of QST September 1967 issue for
a very large table of QSO scoring based on CQ zone matrix of correspondents.

What should be a lesson, is that these contests invariably ended up with bigger lookup
tables for "correcting" QSO's for difficulty, than they had entrants!!!! It will
be a stretch for anyone to remember the names of these contests although old issues 
of QST are a start. That's how successful the "universal correction" was.

This was before gridsquares of course. I think the TBDC hits a nice middle ground
and best of all nobody has to compute their own score. In fact it is by
definition impossible to compute your own score (not knowing whether the other
guy is HP, LP, or QRP.) Even with these factors there are still some locations
and styles and stations that have advantages over others.

I would hazard a guess that few of us enter it with an eye purely on score. If
folks only entered contests they would "win" there would only ever be one entrant
in each contest, a great loss for us all. I enjoy contest activity even though
I've never won any :-)

Tim N3QE