[VHFcontesting] contest grid activity summaries?

[nosigma at aol.com]

Looking at the scope of the effort it may not be that hard for a single contest.  In January there were 918 logs and 62,000 exchanges.  If one were to plot the location (6 digit grid) and band capabilities of just those who submitted logs I think it's a managable manual task.  

As a point of reference it took me 2 months of evenings and weekends to plot the location and send a personal email to every ham on QRZ with an email within 250mi of my station, about 4,000 requesting an FM Q for Sept 2016.  Doing just 918 without emails should take less time.  

If the .csv file listing preliminary scores is still available then most of the needed data, call sign and bands would be in a single file so there is no need to download all the logs.  Getting the 6 digit grid would still require going to QRZ.

Using the logs to capture ALL stations in the logs whether they submitted logs or not would be a much more arduous task.  It calls for some level of automation, a code to harvest, sort and plot the data which is beyond my capabilities.  Probably a simple task for a good software writer.  I will ask a couple of "my IT guys" at work just how hard/expensive this would be.  The jewel here would be to have the code in hand to repeat the task and update the map after every contest.

Another useful data set is available from the W3SV and K1RZ database of vhf uhf stations.  This is "crowd sourced", ie people enter their own data and it has several hundred stations in it.  It includes bands, calls and 6 digit grids.  It wont catch the casual  contester and may be biased to the east coast, not sure.

Your thoughts?

73
John
KM4KMU 
On Thursday, July 4, 2019 K7XC Tim Marek <k7xcnv1 at gmail.com> wrote:
Another aspect of what your talking about is something that I have always thought would be cool to do with all that data would be to compare as much geophysical data against the log data and plot/observe the logged activity vrs what was really happening physically and look for trends that might actually predict the formation of Es, etc. With a database that large the possibilities are endless. 

73s de Tim - K7XC - DM09jh... sk
Adapt, Overcome, Succeed! 





On Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 10:21 PM Chris Lumens <chris at lumensoutdoors.org> wrote:

> This is a tempting project to undertake.  I love metadata.

I have been thinking for a while now about grabbing contest logs for as
far back as I can find and importing them all into a database and then
doing... something with them.  Plotting where they were made.  Figuring
out which bands are useful in which areas.  Seeing how scores change
over time.

I hadn't really decided exactly what I would do, and I've got enough
other projects occupying my time that I haven't gotten around to it.

-- 
Chris Lumens - KG6CIH
Hike * MTB * XC Ski * Haskell
Research - Experimentation - Testing - More Testing
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