[UK-CONTEST] CABRILLO (again!)

[Donald Field]

I have just returned from a week's holiday to see a veritable waterfall of
messages regarding Cabrillo. I'm not entirely sure what has prompted this,
as many of the subscribers to this reflector were at the HF Convention in
October, when the HFCC announced its intention to move in this direction.
Maybe it was the problems with the Stew Perry contest? If so, this is a case
of generalising from the specific. Many of you will now have seen my
"Cabrillo primer" which was in the latest CDXC Digest, and is also
accessible via the HFCC Web site. Can I add a few observations, based on
some of the issues which have been raised here: Apologies if I am going over
ground which has already been covered. As the old saying goes, I would have
made this shorter if I had had more time!

1. Timing. There isn't an ideal time to adopt any "standard" and it's true
that early 2003 RSGB contests may not be fully supported by the popular
logging packages. However, to have waited would have lost another full year.
As it happens, one of the key players in getting the definitions finalised
has had significant personal problems to deal with recently; another has had
to travel a lot. We sometimes forget that, unfortunately, the RSGB HFCC and
similar bodies are required to call on the volunteer efforts of human
beings. Hopefully this will only be temporary! But, seriously, no-one
expects there will be an overnight migration to Cabrillo (hence the
statement in the rules that this is the "preferred" format rather than it
being "mandatory"). Nor is it the intention to force entrants to use
computers (though I note that some correspondents here would be in favour of
that). But the hope is that, by encouragement rather than coercion, there
will be a rapid trend in that direction. To be perfectly frank, with the
software that G4FON has developed for the HFCC, we can now convert most
common formats (CT's .RES and .BIN, for example, plus many others) to what
we need, but surely it makes sense to encourage entries that are close to
being conformant right from the start? No one will be penalised for
non-conformance (but frankly, some IOTA logs I received this year were
totally unreadable and unconvertable, and this is the risk we run by not
trying to set some sort of "standard").

2. Which perhaps takes us nicely into the question regarding whether, for
example, dupes should still be shown in paper logs. When logs were
adjudicated by hand and on paper, adjudicators could not be expected to
prepare dupe sheets so, quite rightly, there was a big penalty for unmarked
dupes. With computer adjudication, dupes are a non-issue. The question,
therefore, is whether the HFCC will now convert all paper logs to PC. For
IOTA the answer is already "yes" and has been for the last two years (this
is NOT a Cabrillo issue, it is true with any discussion of paper vs. PC
logs). But not all the HFCC adjudicators are ready for this yet, so there is
no universal answer. Again, sadly, we rely on human beings! What is certain
is that, increasingly, logs WILL be converted to PC (with emphasis on the
high-scoring ones, in the top ten, potential trophy winners, etc.).

3. Cabrillo as a Standard? I have seen some very emotive statements about
Cabrillo. I think G3SEK best captured what Cabrillo is, when he described it
as a standard for templates. Anyone who is looking for a simple contest
logging standard, forget it. Every contest (it seems!) has a different
exchange, so don't for a minute imagine the RSGB "standard" or ADIF were any
better. RSGB format was never seriously supported by software authors or the
contesting community (of 1300 logs in IOTA last year, only one was RSGB
format), so let's not lament its passing. ADIF is fine for log data
exchange, for which it was invented, but is a nightmare for casual entrants
to generate with a text editor or Word processor. Sure, Cabrillo is far from
ideal and won't last that many years, as some of you have already pointed
out (it's inventor would be the first to agree with the preceding
statement). But then, neither did DOS, neither did Wordstar, etc, etc.
Welcome to the wonderful world of computers! However, it should do the job
for a while, before a decent XML-based standard appears, and has the benefit
that it is supported by most of the major logging software authors (who,
like it or not, are mostly US-based). In the PC world, something which works
is better than an idealised "standard" (I recall a highly qualified
colleague telling me that TCP/IP was rubbish, and only OSI would survive
because, unlike TCP/IP, it was a true "standard". Anyone remember OSI? Or
Teletex?). Cabrillo has the advantage that both log and summary info. are in
a single file. I, for one, would like to see some way of marking zero-point
QSOs ("I worked this on SSB when I was a CW entry"), but good adjudication
software should be able to figure out this stuff anyway. As it happens, most
contests require pretty much the same fields - RST, serial (possibly) and
one other piece of data (grid square, county code, post code, IOTA, or
whatever) in addition to time, band, mode, etc. Cabrillo handles this just
fine, so to suggest there will be a proliferation of definitions, as some
do, isn't actually true. I think the only RSGB contest which will be hard to
encapsulate is Club Calls, as club names don't follow an agreed format.

4. The Robot. There is massive confusion here. The Robot is simply a server.
Those of you who submitted an IOTA log this year have already used it,
whether you were aware of it or not. All we had it looking for was a
callsign in the subject field. No callsign, you got an error message.
Anything else was accepted, regardless of log format, etc. As the years move
on, we can hopefully check more aspects automatically - this will reduce the
manual workload on the adjudicators. But the robot can be programmed to act
differently for every contest, so just because the Stew Perry organisers get
the robot to act in a certain way, don't imagine for a moment that will be
necessarily be true of all contests. Robot doesn't equal Cabrillo or vice
versa. There are several steps here - Collecting logs (Robot), Converting
logs (Cabrillo helps here, but we can also use various conversion priograms
available to us) to generate a single database for the contest, Adjudicating
Logs (Tim G4VXE is writing modules to check, for example, band, mode, serial
number, dupes, etc. Most will be common to all contests, some, like IOTA
ref, will only apply to one contest. The adjudicator will run whichever
modeules are approriate), Final Tabulation (Scoring, presentation of
results - look at the Web presentations that ARRL are now doing, almost
fully automatically, with many of their conetsts). As you will gather,
Cabrillo is just one element of a much broader picture.

5. Claimed scores. Again, it depends on what a particular adjudicator
decides. For IOTA, I don't really care. If you show a claimed score, it will
appear in the list of claimed scores. If you don't, it won't. Final scores
are all calculated from the log. But I do a check of final against claimed,
where a claimed was entered, and if there is a big difference, I try to
figure out why, in case we have made an error in adjudication. So another
good reason to enter a claimed score. But, as I say, it depends on the
contest and who is adjudicating it. Again, this isn't specific to Cabrillo -
this has been happening for years. No self-respecting adjudicator will work
from a Claimed Score, even for a paper log - he will rescore after checking
the log.

Hope this helps. What I have said isn't, by the way, any sort of "official"
line. I'm not even a member of HFCC. But I have been a proponent of this
move, because the IOTA contest, as the biggest RSGB event in terms of
entrants, has become almost unmanageable with the plethora of log-types and
summary sheet formats I have been receiving (including, in one instance, a
JPEG of someone's paper log!). Something had to be done. The long-term
benefit should be much quicker log checking and publication of results.

Don't despair, Rome wasn't built in a day, but it's a beautiful city!

73 Don G3XTT
IOTA Contest Manager