[UK-CONTEST] IOTA contest thoughts

[Dave Sharred]

It's good to see the comments from all about IOTA contest. Thanks to Don,
Chris, Dave (BUO), Jim, Zoli and Colin for sharing their views.

Colin, in my opinion , is very close to the mark; and I agreed with I think
all of his opinions. I was going to comment also; but he beat me to it.

After reading Jim's note; I was going to analyse the ratio of 15 pointers to
3 pointers; from our near 3000 QSO's. Sometimes, this is a trade-off in
working 40m, hoping to bag some G's and other islands at a slower rate, or
running 20m at a much higher rate but less average points per QSO!

As all of the leading stations know; mults are imperative though to having a
good final score; and your strategy has to maximise that also.

If we discouraged non-island stations from participating; it would surely be
a much lesser contest; lose it's appeal; and maybe end up with support
nearer to the BERU contest !!! This event is a major attraction in the
contesting calendar; and, as the adage goes; if it aint broke, don't fix it
!

Zoli's comment on the EU appeal is also very valid - strangely enough
though; this means that you don't necessarily have to put up big arrays;
especially for 80/40m, to be competitive - it is high angle radiation on
these bands.  From MD4K; JA were frozen out this year, by the disturbances,
as were most of the NA participants. It was pleasing however, to note that
KP2/AA2BU was doing very well; at least in terms of QSO's.  I suspect, as in
CQWW, there are "sweet spots" around the world to win the contest; probably
Eu is fortunate to be in the sweet spot, by virtue of the number of Islands
within a relatively small radius

I disagree on changing the mult rules - by having mults per band and mode;
it encourages one to use all bands and modes - this helps the overall QSO
rate for everybody; if the ruling were changed then maybe there is less
incentive to give your juicy mult out on, say, CW - you may find that single
mode entries would have the dominant score!

I too, like Zoli, would like to see automatic credit for our own island -
clearly some IOTA refs have a big choice of stations to call on , for their
own mult. I suspect that we worked more GJ stations than those heard from
GD! If this lines up with IOTA rules; this is an excellent point !

Finally as was also pointed out - this contest sports so many sections that
surely there must be a realistic category for all entrants. Any newcomer to
this contest is well advised to study the rules / categories/ results from
the previous year, before deciding what category he/she should compete in.

As a final comment; I just looked at our log for Jim, Dave, and Chris's
entry; and saw that we worked MM0Q on 2 band/modes only (80/40SSB); M8C on 4
bands (80/40 SSB/CW); and GU8D on 4 band/modes (80/20 SSB; 80/40CW).  What
this shows I am not sure - either conditions were poor on HF for local
inter-G; or we are all poor at passing our mults!  Something to think about!

73

Dave G3NKC
Member of the MD4K team; and QSL manager

PS - We will publish our score when we know what it is - we have major log
problems, that we are still trying to unravel!