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The re-score of the 2009 IARU HF Contest has prompted an official protest, as the Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles has asked the ARRL to revisit its decision to add back certain "unique" contacts, which put DA0HQ of Germany in first place over AO8HQ.
The original ARRL scoring had thrown out uniques for all stations, which the ARRL had blamed on a wrongly configured log checking program.
"QSOs with many calls that were genuine uniques - and therefore good QSOs - were judged to be busted QSOs," wrote ARRL Contest Manager Sean Kutzo KX9X on his contest blog.
The change had its most dramatic impact on the HQ category, where DA0HQ was given back 3,606 contacts, boosting their final score by almost two million points.
"DA0HQ has up to ten times as many Unique QSOs than the other top competitors," says a letter from URE President Diego Trujillo EA7MK to the ARRL, arguing no contest should allow a high number of uniques.
"CQWW DX, CQ WPX, and Russian DX contests go a step further and consider a high number of Uniques as a possible motive for disqualification," he added.
Here is the breakdown of the change in the QSO totals of top ten HQ stations when the 2009 IARU was re-scored by the ARRL:
But the German club behind Team DA0HQ says the Spanish are simply wrong in their argument.
"The log checking procedure is now, how the ARRL has planned it initially," said Ben Bieske DL5ANT and Lothar Wilke DL3TD in a statement sent to radio-sport.net.
"This procedure was NOT changed, only an error in the log checking software was fixed," they emphasized.
"Our Spanish friends are a little bit wrong about the reason for recalculation of IARU results," they added.
"So the EAs are protesting against something what is not reality."
The last time DA0HQ won the HQ competition was in 2007, and after the results came out that year, there were charges that German stations were working only DA0HQ, leading to a large number of unique contacts, with a lot of focus on the team's numbers on 160 meters.
"Is this "contesting"?? I think not," thundered Jim Neiger N6TJ on the CQ-Contest reflector in June of 2007. "These uniques should simply be eliminated from the log."
"So "cheating" or not - it should not come as a surprise that your neighbours raise their eyebrows and ask questions," added Franki Van Neyghem on the same 2007 thread.
Even some German hams raised a red flag on the reflector about working only the HQ station of your home country.
"A lot of my German fellow hams only do qsos with DA0HQ during that contest and work nobody else, not even other Germans, just to get a sprint award or the 12-Band qsl card," wrote Peter Voelpel DF3KV in 2007.
That year, DA0HQ had 2,535 contacts on 160; second place TM0HQ had 800, OM7HQ 992 and fourth place SN0HQ was at 1426, the second largest number of 160 QSOs.
SN0HQ had the second largest number of contacts added back in 2009 - 1,334 - but that still was far short of the 3,606 for DA0HQ.
The 2005 IARU Contest also brought questions on CQ-Contest about DA0HQ's 160 meter operations, when the German HQ station worked 2390 QSOs on 160 meters, far more than other stations in Europe.
For example, the Deustcher Amateur Radio Club web site has a countdown to the 2010 IARU HF, with the HQ preparatory meeting listed for April 10, 2010 in Arnstadt.
Then there is correspondence between ARRL HQ and DA0HQ team leaders about the change in scoring, and a further email to radio-sport.net.
Diego Trujillo EA7MK to ARRL HQ:
1. DA0HQ has up to ten times as many Unique QSOs than the other top competitors. This extremely high number is what gives them the victory....
2. ALL of the Unique QSOs have been accepted as valid, as you explained in your kind email and in the rectification. It is therefore obvious that there is no way of checking the validity or lack of validity of those contacts...
a. Giving full validity to a disproportionately high number of Unique contacts seriously prejudices fair competition. Even supposing that the Uniques are in good faith, they will always have a higher point value than the normal QSOs in a given list...
b. The big prestigious worldwide contests, which have a large number of participants, all have a rigorous treatment of Unique QSOs. No contest which is well considered allows a disproportionately high number of Uniques. CQWW DX, CQ WPX, and Russian DX contests go a step further and consider a high number of Uniques as a possible motive for disqualification....URE has a policy in all their sponsored contests, that Uniques are given zero points, for the aforementioned reasons. Since it is applied equally to all participants, there is no discrimination since everyone has the same level: Uniques, zero points.
c. Acceptance of a disproportionately large number of Uniques opens the door to risk-free cheating. If all Uniques are considered to be valid, why waste time checking logs? If a high percentage of Uniques is acceptable, log checking loses much of its significance....
d. Encouraging your society members to ONLY contact one station is against contest sportsmanship....However, if a society requests, or manages to make many of their member stations ONLY contact one station, the spirit of fair competition is being perverted and goes against any kind of ethics....
We request, therefore, that the ARRL reconsiders its decision to reclassify the results published in QST (March 2010), and to establish a maximum threshold for Uniques which would be acceptable without upsetting good sportsmanship. We are not asking that Uniques be eliminated, (although that might be a reasonable request)....
Diego Trujillo, EA7MK President URE, Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles
Emails between DA0HQ and ARRL Headquarters:
We (DA0HQ) asked Sean, KX9X, ARRL Contest Branch Manager, for UBN report and the meaning of "BUSTED CALLS".
KX9X answers: "For each unique call, we look at other calls that are active at the same time on the same band. If we find a strong possibility that the unique call was busted as a possible call (which is similar to how the data is presented for the CQ WW contest) - that call will be identified as a 'busted" call'."
"A busted call will be deleted and a penality of one additional QSO will be calculated. We found, that in a case of a busted call not only this one but ALL QSOs with that station were deleted (+1 penalty for every qso), INDEPENDENTLY of TIME AND MODE."
DL3TD/DL5ANT statement to radio-sport.net:
Conclusion: The log checking procedure is now, how the ARRL has planned it initially. This procedure was NOT changed, only an error in the log checking software was fixed. Now the log check has the behavior the ARRL ever wanted. That has nothing to do with DA0HQ only, but with all participating station because all of them want a fair competition and an error free log checking software.
The Europeans discussed that at IARU Region 1 session in Vienna two weeks ago and agreed, that all will be ok for the next world championship.
So the EAs are protesting against something what is not reality...
Ben, DL5ANT, and Lothar, DL3TD
