[UK-CONTEST] 80mcc finetuning (longish)

[Richard Allisette]

Hi All,

Just returned from the Friedrichshafen beer-fest and London de-tox clinic, so catching up with the 80m CC thread.
My own feeling is that the CW leg is trying to be all things to all men - a concept normally doomed to failure.
The contest is to be applauded for trying to include newcomers to CW, and CW contesting in particular, with the QRS corral.
However, with the top ten finishers now working more than 100 stations each leg (and therefore at a rate of more than 1 a minute) there is little to tempt those trying to win the contest into the corral.
After all, if you are running stations at 1 every 40 seconds say, you are unlikely to want to spend 3 minutes trying to unravel some badly sent slow CW no matter how altruistic you are feeling.
As I see it, the winners want to win, and helping the newboys is not going to this with the rules as they stand.
So, how do we overcome this?
Make the newcomers more attractive to the serious competitors somehow.
Working newcomers should attract extra points.
So, how to identify the newcomers? Not too sure on this one, maybe they send QRS after their 599 rather than any sort of serial number, saving any blushes if they are finding it hard going, or NEW or something.
Perhaps they could have their own section in the results, though to this would need some sort of pre-registration of their intent rather like is done in NFD. 
Alternatively, perhaps there should be an additional half hour at the start of the contest open to all but with everyone sending at no more than say 12WPM, points to count as in the main contest.
That way those doing their best to win would need to work as many people as they could in this initial QRS period to add to their final tally.
Apologies if these thoughts have already been discussed by the HF Contest Committee but this is a great contest, rapidly gaining in popularity.
And this popularity is only likely to amplify the problems.
In my opinion it, or at least the CW leg, needs just a little fine tuning.
Be interested to hear the thoughts of others.

73 Dick GU4CHY