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The second year of "open logs" from the CQ World Wide DX Contests is not only giving contesters another look at how their competitors did, but it is also producing more questions about the log checking process.
And it is bringing some admissions of log review mistakes as well from CQ WW Contest Committee Chairman Bob Cox K3EST, who found UBN/NIL reports from the 2007 CQWW SSB publicly challenged.
"While some logs have received unjustified score reductions, as far as we can determine, it is unlikely that any of these errors have changed the outcome of the contest," said Cox.
"The CQWW Contest Committee greatly appreciates your feedback," Cox wrote on the CQ-Contest reflector, "it helps us fix things and continuously improve the quality of the adjudication process."
Cox said this was a "major transition year for the CQWW log-checking process," which included new people and new software, that evidently wasn't hitting on all cylinders.
The CQ Contest Chief also took time to send some personal explanations to those affected.
"He said my log was perfect," said Richard King K5NA, "and he would try to get a correction in CQ Magazine if space permits."
King had publicly complained about why his multi-op lost a series of QSO's for supposedly violating the rule on band changes by a multi-op.
"We lost a ton of multipliers to this and suffered a large score reduction," King said, telling radio-sport.net that his team was docked for 23 band change violations.
Among those trying to get some answers as well was Mike Tessmer K9NW, who was able to cross-check the logs of some of his busted contacts, and instead found that he had been wrongly penalized for his FM/K9NW operation.
"I exchanged a couple emails with one of the committee members. They're looking into some issues that seem to have popped up," Tessmer told radio-sport.net.
"A few stations logged me as K9NW. They got it wrong, I was hit with the NIL," Tessmer complained on the CQ-Contest reflector.
"A few stations logged me as FM9NW. They got it wrong, I was hit with the NIL."
Others were aggravated by penalties for getting the calls of two stations wrong, UN7MMM and JJ2CJB.
The trouble began when the two entered their calls incorrectly in their Cabrillo file that was submitted to the CQWW SSB log robot.
Valey Tuzhilkin of Kazakhstan accidentally added a letter when submitting his log, "CALLSIGN: UN7MMMM" is what his log shows.
The same error befell Seiichirou Miki JJ2CJB, who put an extra letter on the front of his call, "CALLSIGN: JJJ2CJB."
Unfortunately, that seemed to cost others points, but not so much UN7MMM or JJ2CJB.
"All people who worked them in the contest are being penalized for "busted calls," said Yuri Onipko VE3DZ.
"The question is - is it fair?"
While it is possible to go through the logs of all the competitors in the CQ WW SSB test because of that contest's open log policy, the results of log checks (the so-called UBN/NIL) are only made available to the individual station.
A radio-sport.net review of log checking statistics accidentally made available on the internet earlier this month from the CQ WW SSB test does not show a massive error rate for either UN7MMM or JJ2CJB.
While JJ2CJB lost 16.6% of his raw score, going from 222,420 down to 185,535, the figures from the CQ WW spreadsheet show only 15 bad contacts.
UN7MMM had 30 bad QSO's, as his score dropped 6.6% from 631,620 to 589,860.
As for the band change violations that plagued the log of King K5NA, he provided radio-sport.net with several examples of busted contacts that should never have been struck from his log.
"In the Cabrillo log the run station is designated as a "0" (zero) and the multiplier station is a "1" (one)," King said.
"Five more QSOs were made on 80M and the last of which, F6CTT at 0249Z, was flagged as a band change violation," King said.
"There was no band change between the good QSOs and the flagged band change violation."
King praised the admission of error by the CQ WW Contest Committee, after several days of grumbling from various quarters.
"I am now a happy camper. I think the CQWW Committee will do 'what is right.'"
In all, some 4,876 logs are available for your review from 1A3A to ZY7EAM. Log error files for each call are not public, as the so-called UBN/NIL files can be accessed only with a password from CQ WW.
The list of SSB logs from the 2007 CQ WW test can be seen at http://www.cqww.com/ssblogs.htm.
What keys are you looking for? What ideas did you come up with?
Also, do you think the ARRL should follow suit and open logs as well? What about other major CQ Magazine contests?
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