[VHFcontesting] Grid circling group & VUAC

[frank bechdoldt]

It looks like they 1/2 fixed the problem of grid circling. Not to pick on the California group this time. They coordinated things simular to what I hear is a east coast fashion and apparently worked everyone they could hear.  They had some key stationary stations as well and it would be a feat if they won every catagory in thier area as a team.
 
In doing so they might upset more people and that seems to be part of the fruit of thier labor.  
 
The problem witt he rule now is how much coordination is allowed to manafactuer points and what are the methods approved for doing this?
 
I imagine the group maximized thier multipliers to get as close as possible to ensuring each of the 100 QSOs produced a new multipler.  IE there is 40 possible multiplers per intersection circled.  Therefore each rover partner is good for 2 1/2 circles. If they scheduled it right they could do it in a round robin fashion to pull off the meetings at certin times. (I don't know if thats the case, I was previosly told they travel together for safety reasons.)   IE if they went to 15 grids then you need 2 roving parteners to ensure the 150 grids worked are harvested as multipliers.  
 
A better compairison would be a 16 grid run for 160 grids and 640 qsos or 1240 qsos ( with 2 parteners) .  Therefore the new rules pruned the scores  down to 200 Qsos and 160 grids with a 3 person team.  
 
Or perhaps in this case A guy would get 4 qsos per grid from the limited rover and 6 qsos per grid from the unlimited rover for multipliers. Then in 15 grids you get 60 mults from the limited and 90 mults from the unlimited. 
 
So the question for the VUAC and the ARRL is how much coordination will the ARRL allow to inflate a score.
 
Perhaps the multiplies should be eliminated from rover to rover contacts.
And no more than 10 percent of your contacts could be from another rover if you are a rover.  Except for unlimited.
 
What the ARRL is missing is that the contiversy will not go away as long as you have a contest where people pre-arrange a large percentage of thier QSOS.
 
That being said it sounds like they are working more people.  But how can we use contest data like this to justify spectrum allocation for people to work each other where most of thier conversations could be done on a radio shack walkie talkie.  
 
Again it doesnt seem much different than some of the efforts back east and at least they are open about it, working some distances and not 98 percent each other.  Perhaps there isnt many people to talk to in southern california and this needed to spark interest down there. 
 
BAck to the drawing board....
 
k3uhf
 
 
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