BREAKING DOWN THE WRTC RULES - CAN YOU QUALIFY FOR 2010?

By Jamie Dupree NS3T 

With the final qualifying rules now out for the 2010 World Radiosport Team Championships, contesters around the world are just now looking at the details and trying to figure out their gameplan for Russia.

In order to have a chance to qualify, you first need to read the rules, because the scoring system is a bit complicated. (Download them from radio-sport.net.)

The basics for WRTC qualifying are fairly simple:

• You submit your top eight WRTC qualifying scores

• No more than four scores from outside your "home" region

• No more than four scores from multi-ops

• QRP and single band entries don't qualify

The preferred entry is single operator, high power. Anything else and your score can be trimmed back by a formula developed by the Russian sponsors for the 2010 WRTC. Assisted, low power and multi-multi entries lose the most when adjusted.

Basically, instead of thinking that you are competing against everyone else in your category, for WRTC points, you are competing against others in your specific WRTC division.

Europe is split into five different divisions; the US has four, Asia has three, South America, Canada and Oceania have two.

Only certain qualifying contests will allow you to get WRTC points, like CQ WW, ARRL DX and the Russian DX Contest. There is a list on the right hand side of this page.

That list will also tell you that a number of the qualifying contests have already happened! It means some operators got a jump on the field, without knowing that they were already competing for Russia 2010.

Determining your points can be somewhat complicated. In this example, we will use the WAE CW contest from 2006, where NN3W finished second in the NA division #1 to K3CR (op. LZ4AX.)

The WRTC score is the Contest Weight (730 for WAE) multiplied by the Category Factor (1.0 for NN3W in SOHP) times the result of NN3W's contest score (1,117,152) divided by the top score in NA #1 for SOHP by K3CR (1,303,899.)

The final WRTC tally is 625.44 points for NN3W.

One significant late change was made in the final rules, which could further limit a score. The Russians ranked the various categories, so that certain scores are compared not only against their fellow competitors, but also against scores from other categories.

Here is the order of the category rankings:

MM, M2, MS, SOAB-Assisted, SOAB HP, SOAB-single mode, SOAB-LP

What this means is if you run single operator all band high power, you are compared against the maximum score in your category, unless someone outscores you in the assisted, single mode or low power categories.

Multi-two is always compared to multi-two, unless there's a higher score in the multi-single, high power, assisted, single mode or low power categories in your WRTC division.

For example, in the 2006 IARU contest, K6XX won the mixed high power competition in NA #4, with a score of 1,070,001. But K6XX does not get full WRTC points, because K7RL won the SSB single mode category with a score of 1,175,233.

Under the revised rules, K6XX's score is now compared to K7RL's, so instead of getting 740 points, K6XX gets 673.74. K7RL still gets 592 points, as his score is reduced by 20% (x 0.8) because he operated single mode in a mixed mode contest.

Sometimes a low score will get you a lot of WRTC points. N7ZG was the only low power entry in the 2006 WAE SSB contest from NA #4. He only submitted a log with 27 points, but that was the high score in that category for his division. So he gets 511 valuable WRTC points.

In another example, WD5K made 200 contacts for a score of 68,614. That was the best low power score in the W5 and W0 call areas, which make up the #3 division in North America for the WRTC. That nets WD5K 511 WRTC qualifying points.

Compare that to Divsion NA #1, where K1XM had to score over 627,000 points to win low power to grab his 511 WRTC points.