[UK-CONTEST] Re Bob G3PJT

[Lee Volante]

Hi all,

I assume that there are a lot of AFS club members, contest secretaries or 
whatever that motivate their societies members to participate in AFS.  I 
assume this because AFS does see a number of entrants that (at least before 
the recent 80m CC events) only really participated in a couple of contests 
per year.  The key question for me is whether those people hunting for team 
members, and persuading and cajoling people to come on air, and then send in 
a log, would instinctively get 'as many people as they can on' or if they 
would stop and be satisfied when they had a full team. Some clubs have 
enough contesters to easily fill one or more teams (SSB or CW), but for some 
it's more of a struggle.

So for some clubs changing the CW or SSB AFS team size would be a benefit, 
or perhaps mean more of their members are QRV.  But for some others the 
reverse would be true e.g. the team size is too big to fully populate, or 
the team size is small enough so the reticent '5th man' is not needed or 
asked to have a go.  It's not an absolute.

The problem is that it is difficult to be sure that any changes made are 
positive.  If the rules are changed and the number of entries changes, it 
would take a while before we could see a trend and be sure that the rule 
change was the cause, and not just better/worse weather or conditions next 
year, or a more interesting FA Cup clash say for 2007.  But perhaps looking 
over 5 years, there are other factors like the increasing average age of 
contesters to include too.  It's not easy.

Just making a change, any change at all, and changing something people are 
famililar or comfortable with, could have a negative impact.  But you could 
equally argue that other people might make up for this who want to try 
'something new.'   It's all speculative - we can discuss on here for ever 
but it's difficult to prove anything.  For my job I look at lots of 
different data sources, try to find trends and correlations, and then try to 
explain it in laymans terms. On a few occasions it's all been likened to 
'smoke and mirrors' and that with a certain amount of data, you can prove 
anything (!)

Another idea might be to rescore some previous CW AFS contests, but just 
counting the best 3 stations per team.  i.e. are there some great teams out 
there, who perhaps deserve more recognition, but don't because they can only 
phyiscally muster 3 stations.  Similarly, what happens to SSB AFS results if 
you add AFS A + B teams together to get a 5 or 6 person team.  If anyone 
does have some free time to compile this, this could make for some 
interesting data on which to base further discussion, which ultimately could 
influence any rule changes made in the future....  The trick is to try to 
prove that for any changes made, the overall benefits outweigh the problems. 
It's got to be a compromise, unless we all operate WRTC-style from 
Nottingham or Oxford.

So, from the summary so far, we collectively would like:

Teams of 3 for both contests
Teams of 5 or more for both contests
RTTY
Multipliers
Distance scoring
No AFS distance rule
Low Power / QRP sections
Everything left alone

Some of the above appear not to be compatible hi.  Any more ?   Please pity 
your HFCC colleagues :-)  (joking)

73,

Lee G0MTN

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "peter jackson" <peter.jackson17 at ntlworld.com>
To: "contest" <uk-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 11:41 AM
Subject: [UK-CONTEST] Re Bob G3PJT


>I think Bob's idea would be self defeating, there is am old saying ' you 
>can
> take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink'
> 73 Pete