Topband: DX Window-Redux

[Jim F.]

Thanks Tim...Very well said !

This expresses my feelings about TB radio contesting.
 

"The challenges of competition can be stimulating and enjoyable.
But when beating the oponent takes precedence in the mind over 
performing as well as possible, enjoyment tends to disappear.
Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one's
skills: when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun."
Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi
 
How else could a fairly sane QRPer look at life on Top Band ?
 
And my "Swish Swish" noise problem seems to appear and vanish 
in sync with my neighbor's outside Christmas lights even though they
don't appear to blink on and off. 
 
Merry Christmas Everybody !
 
jim / W1FMR
 

--- On Fri, 12/7/12, Shoppa, Tim <tshoppa at wmata.com> wrote:


From: Shoppa, Tim <tshoppa at wmata.com>
Subject: Re: Topband: DX Window-Redux
To: "Tom W8JI" <w8ji at w8ji.com>, "herbs at vitelcom.net" <herbs at vitelcom.net>, "topband at contesting.com" <topband at contesting.com>
Date: Friday, December 7, 2012, 12:03 PM


> 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
_______________________________________________
Topband reflector - topband at contesting.com