[VHFcontesting] Historical contest dates

[Kenneth E. Harker]

     The Contest Scores Database (http://www.kkn.net/~k5tr/scoredb/) now
has 365,311 line scores from over 40 different amateur radio competitions.
In a few cases, we have every line score ever in a contest (ARRL 10, ARRL RTTY,
Stew Perry, and the Asia-Pacific Sprints) and in others we have line scores 
from the past decade or most of the past decade.

     In an effort to make the data more interesting, we are looking at ways 
to include metadata about the contests and/or the state of the world when 
the contests were taking place.  We've started by loading historical
solar data (solar flux, sunspot count, Kp indices, Ap indices).  We will 
soon be able, for example, to include solar flux numbers with the ARRL 10 
Meter Contest records, so you can see what the sun was doing the year a 
record was set.  Or we might chart the solar flux against the high QSO total 
for each year.  There are all sorts of possibilities.  For VHF+ contests, we 
might (if the data is available) do something similar with moon data or 
meteor counts.

     One of the things we need to make this happen is data on the specific 
times each contest took place each year.  For some contests this is easy to
compute, as the contest always falls on the nth weekend of the month between
certain times.  For other contests this formula for determining the days is 
more of a pain, or has changed over time.  I'm looking for a volunteer to 
research the specific contest dates for VHF contests.  You'll probably need 
either paper copies of the magazines or a set of QST CD-ROMs to go back very 
far.  We could use dates for the following contests (you don't have to 
volunteer for all of them :-):

ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes
ARRL June VHF QSO Party
ARRL September VHF QSO Party
ARRL August UHF Contest
ARRL 10 GHz and Up Cumulative Contest
ARRL International EME Contest
ARRL Spring Sprints
ETDXA Spring Sprints
SMIRK Contest
CQ VHF Contest

     Some of these contests have multiple weekends, and we'd like the times 
for each weekend in those cases.  I'm looking for data like this, as far 
back in time as we can get it:

ARRL	June VHF QSO Party	2006	1	2006-06-10 18:00:00	2007-06-12 03:00:00
ARRL	June VHF QSO Party	2007	1	2007-06-09 18:00:00	2007-06-11 03:00:00

     Any volunteers?  

-- 
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker at kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/