[UK-CONTEST] Normalising scores in the tuesday night UK Activity contests

[Chris G4FZN]

First of all, congratulations to Allan Duncan, GM4ZUK, who won the Open
section of this year's series of 4m UK Activity contests. He entered all
four of them during the year, and his final score was 17 points ahead of
mine. Allen always puts out a great signal from Aberdeen, in all kinds of
weather, and his win is well deserved. 

 

The Restricted section had an even closer finish, with only 9 points between
first and second places. My comments below probably apply to that section
too.

 

The closeness of the Open section result has prompted me to look at the
system of normalising scores, and left me wondering if I am not alone in
thinking that the method may be less than perfect. Please be abundantly
clear that I have no "sour grapes" regarding the result, but below I will
demonstrate how the result could have been different without any changes to
either of our stations worked.

 

GM4ZUK and myself each came in second place once in the series. 

 

Allen came second in May (when there were 12 entries in the Open section),
and gained 917 points. I came second in August (when there were 10 entries),
and thus I gained 900 points. In each of those months, the winner received
1000 points, but the runner-up and other places received a number of points
which depended on the number of entries.

 

The final year score is made up from the sum of each month's normalised
scores.

 

If there had been two more entrants in the August event or two fewer
entrants in the May event --- regardless of whether Allen or myself worked
them or not --- then the second place would have received 17 more points,
and the year's result would then have been a tie.

 

My point is that the final result is swayed by the number of entrants in
each month's contest, and it does not matter if they were worked or not. In
August, for instance, just a couple of stations entering by only working
each other would have changed the entire result.

 

Is it right that the winner always gets the same number of points each
month, but the scores for second, third place and so on vary according to
the number of entrants? Or should the actual (un-normalised) scores be
totalled at the end of the year, and then normalised if need be? Presumably
this has been discussed at length somewhere sometime, but I was not "into"
contesting when this system of normalising scores started, and am interested
to learn the rationale behind it.

 

On a second point, why is it that when there are twelve UKAC in a year, the
best eight scores are used, but when there are only four (as in the case of
4m) then all of them are used? Wouldn't it be more consistent to take only
the best three out of the four?

 

 

73, Chris