K5ZD Commentary

Certificates – Some things never change

Doug, K1DG, relayed this story:

K1AR told me that when W1WY was in charge of the CQ contests, he was also in charge of mailing the certificates.

Frank used cardboard mailing tubes for the certificates. He brought a few hundred to the post office and when the first one was weighed, it was just barely over the weight limit and bumped the postage cost into the next increment.

He took it home and baked it for a few hours to drive out any moisture, then took it back to the post office. It “made weight”, and could be shipped cheaper. He then proceed to hand the post office clerk the rest of the batch “just like that one”, and got them all shipped for the cheaper rate.

Fast-forward to 2015…

If you receive a certificate from a CQ-sponsored contest, you may notice that your address is printed on the envelope, rather than on a label.

Turns out that a label adds just enough weight to bump the large envelope with a certificate in it (a “flat” in PO speak) to the next weight class, raising the cost significantly, especially on the 75% of certificates that are mailed overseas.

 

Some things never change.

 

K5ZD Announcements, CW

Paper logs from CQ WW CW 2014

We continue to accept paper logs for the CQ WW DX Contest. A group of committee members and volunteers help type these logs into the computer so we can fully process them along with the other logs.

For CQ WW CW 2014, our volunteer typists included:

Call    Logs    QSOs 
LU5DX   6       1819 
W4AU    7        784 
VE3EJ   3        694 
US0LW   7        585 
G0MTN   5        493 
ZS4TX   4        489 
S50A    5        391 
HA1AG   1        217 
YU1EW   1         56 
K5ZD    2          7 
Total   41 logs  5,535 QSOs

We urge everyone to submit their logs in electronic format. We will continue to do our best to support submission of logs in any format — including paper.

Thanks to our typists for helping get all of the logs into the system.

K5ZD Announcements

CQ WW Score Database Completed

The project to convert all scores for the complete history of the CQ WW DX Contest into an online database is complete and available for viewing online. In a two year project led by John Golomb N2NC, a team of volunteers typed in all of the results that appeared in the CQ Magazine results from 1948 until 2013. The 2014 results will be added as soon as the results are published.

The historical scores database is available at http://www.cqww.com/score_db.htm. The total number of entries in the database are 169,679 for SSB and 169,005 for CW.

You can select to view results by year/mode and by geographic region (continent, country). A search function can be used to find all participation by a given callsign.  Search for up to three callsigns at one time by entering the calls separated by a comma.

We owe a huge thanks to the team that did the data entry:

AA4NU
AD1C
JK3GAD
K1EA
K3EST
KB9OWD
N1RR
N3RD
N5DX
NM2O
NO5W
OH6NIO
ON7SS
PD2R
W2JU

Some great example searches include:

You can see how the participation has grown over the years by viewing the charts at http://www.cqww.com/stats.htm

The all time records for the CQ WW DX Contest are generated from the database. See http://www.cqww.com/records.htm

Errors are bound to have crept into the results.  Please take a moment to search for your call and review your entries.  Any corrections or questions should be sent Please send any comments or questions at: https://cqww.com/contact.

Thanks again to John and his team for helping to create this fantastic resource!

K5ZD Announcements, SSB

CQ WW SSB 2014 Log Checking is Complete

The log checking and results of the CQ WW DX Contest SSB 2014 are now complete and have been sent to CQ Magazine.  The official results will appear in the April 2015 issue of CQ Magazine.

Some interesting statistics from the log checking for CQ WW SSB 2014.

8,283 logs total
5,241,570 QSOs total
223 different countries
55,182 ( 1.1%) QSO with unique calls
30,609 (55.5%) unique calls busted
41,682 ( 0.8%) dupes
4,378,097 (83.5%) QSO checked against another log
4,261,631 (97.3%) QSO checked good when checked against another log
70,147 ( 1.6%) Busted Calls
19,009 ( 0.4%) busted Exchange
27,310 ( 0.6%) Not in Log

It is quite remarkable that we are able to fully cross check 83.5% of all QSOs in the logs received.

All entrants will be sent a link to their log checking report in the coming days. Use the report to compare your accuracy to the numbers above.

Average score reduction for all logs: 10.3%
Average Error Rate for all logs: 3.2%