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For a second straight year, the ARRL has been forced to rescore the final numbers in the IARU HF Contest, again shuffling the Top Ten boxes of a number of categories, after the results had already been finalized and printed in the March edition QST Magazine.
"We revamped the IARU adjudication after 2008 and did extensive quality-checking to the algorithm," said ARRL Contest Manager Sean Kutzko KX9X.
"Obviously, something was missed. We have already applied the knowledge gained from this experience and WILL be ready to go for IARU 2010," he told radio-sport.net.
Kutzko said the 2009 score troubles stemmed from wrongly configured log checking program that reviews uniques.
"As a result, QSOs with many calls that were genuine uniques - and therefore good QSOs - were judged to be busted QSOs," Kutzko wrote on his ARRL Contest blog.
The biggest change in the 2009 final results involved the HQ category, as Team DA0HQ jumped into first place when the scores were checked a second time.
One example was Team DA0HQ, which in the original results had 22,525 QSO's and 23,531,500 points - their final tally jumped almost two million points and over 3,600 unique contacts in the rescored results - to 26,131 QSO's and 25,508,500 points.
AO8HQ also added over a million points thanks to an extra 420 contacts and one multiplier, but fell to second place with 25,263,261.
Also changing hands was third place, as SN0HQ moved up, with OL9HQ slipping to fourth.
Just like the 2008 contest re-score, there was only one different winner, but other categories saw slight shifts in the various Top Ten lists.
For example, UT2UZ was still the winner in Single Operator Low Power Mixed, but RU6CQ jumped over VE3DZ to get into second place, adding over 22k points, while VE3DZ saw about 3900 points added to his final score.
One of largest jumps of all in the re-score came for Bill Kollenbaum KH7XS, who went from eighth place overall in Single Operator SSB Only High Power, all the way to second place.
The first time, KH7XS had 1.47 million - but the final tally put him at 2.07 million - an increase of just over 600,000 points - about 40% of his original score.
For some competitors though, there was no increase. John Crovelli W2GD for example saw his score drop by 228 points, but it was still high enough to crush the old QRP mark for the US that had been held by N2WN.
As for next year?
"The log-checking software has been re-configured and tested, and we are confident this matter has been resolved," said the ARRL's Kutzko.
Sometimes the unique call is an incorrect, or busted callsign; sometimes that one person only made that one contact.
Some people argue uniques should be tossed out of a log without penalty, others argue they should be left in.
In this case, the log scoring/checking algorithm used in the IARU contest evidently weeded out uniques entirely, judging them as busted QSOs.
For some, those were huge numbers, especially in the HQ category. Here are the numbers of contacts added back to the totals of top ten HQ stations when the 2009 IARU was re-scored by the ARRL:
Not all contests have treated uniques in the same manner.
For example in the 2006 World Radiosport Team Championships in Brazil (run during the IARU), all uniques were deleted from the logs of the 46 teams, after concerns of phantom QSOs for one team.
4L0A (UU0JM) - Single Op High Power Mixed
UT2UZ - Single Op Low Power Mixed
OK7CM - Single Op QRP Mixed
UT5UGR- Single Op High Power SSB
IZ2FOS- Single Op Low Power SSB
HA5KDQ (HA5NB) - Single Op QRP SSB
OH0R (OH2PM) - SO High Power CW
HG7T (HA7TM) - SO Low Power CW
HG5A (HA5IW) - Single Op QRP CW
P33W - Multi Op
DA0HQ - HQ Stations
