Topband: Stew Perry Contest

[Stan Stockton]

The Stew Perry Contest should be the standard for log processing.  Also,
unlike every other contest I have never seen anyone complain about the
scoring not being fair.

I have not worked the contest every year and I had forgotten how the logs
are processed.  I just submitted my log and then looked at the preliminary
results.

Apparently, perhaps once a day or so the logs are checked against all the
other logs that have been submitted and the results are shown as of that
moment in time. In this particular contest you receive bonus points for
working low power and QRP stations and so the scores change based on the
logs that have been received since the last update.  The station at the top
of the list, NP2J, score is already a thousand points higher than what he
claimed on 3830.

Compare this process to every other contest where you submit your log and
perhaps even forgot you worked the contest at all before the results are
published many months later.

Regarding the Stew, I have never had a low noise situation here before this
weekend.  A couple of days before the contest it rained hard and high wind
blew in some really cold air.  It was about 70 degrees and 30 MPH wind.
The noise went down a lot - like it was only about S5 as compared to the
normal S8-9.  I was able to work over 200 Europeans, a couple of JAs, VK,
ZL, etc.

I can see myself with my thumb over the end of a water hose before the CQ
160 Contest trying to spray water on power line insulators!

This morning I got on for a few minutes to try to work DS1JFY who thought
he had worked me via long path at my start (sunset) of the SP Contest (not
a chance of that from this location on the island).  He wanted a schedule.
I got on about 10 minutes before sunrise and worked VK3HJ, JA0MVW, HL5IVL,
DS1JFY and JA5DQH.  I had stopped about sunrise and was reading my email
with the headphones still on and heard someone send "Stan".  A couple of
question marks and Aki identified himself.  He had the best signal of all
of them.

Happy New Year to everyone and may you too have noise reducing rain in the
new year.

73...Stan, ZF9CW