Noticed on Saturday last week that the log check reports for the 2009 ARRL 160m contest had been posted on the ARRL website. How I found them, I’m not sure. The ARRL site has been well shuffled. In my life as a DP professional, it was important to stress the significance such sweeping change would have to the hapless victims – i.e., the poor folks who actually used the program interfaces to get their jobs done.
Its like this – the hapless victims(in this example ME) had a working knowledge of “how it works”. That knowledge was reinforced by 0 to 20(eleven) years of hands on habitual training. Sometimes that is good, sometimes not good. Tossing these years of “habit” is often more or less equivalent to firing the entire staff and starting with fresh high school grads. Sometimes that sort of drastic change was required to achieve the goals. More often it was just done on the whimsy of the dork making the decisions. So – whimsy or requirement? But I digress into grumpy Old Fart-ville….
Yet I am smiling. The LCR, once found, is for me one of the best things about the ARRL contests. It is a blow by blow breakdown of what was screwed up. In this case the 2009 ARRL 160m LCR is better news than most. It’s the best CW LCR I have had – ever. On 201 QSO’s I busted only 2 calls, and had one exchange busted. O’course, it was only 200 Q’s total, but improvement is always good.
Operating for only about four hours, about half of the QSO’s were from runs, and the rest from S&P. The rate was low by Bigg Gunn standards, but about normal for the low power 160m KazShack. This low error rate even beat out a lot of my SSB LCR’s. It may in fact be the best LCR for any of my contests, either mode. SWEEEET!
Now, I just need to get the Sweepstakes log(and every other log) to be as good as this ARRL 160m log. Sweepstakes was terrible. In 2008 most of the errors were on the exchanges. 2009 CW Sweeps was a step backwards, with more callsign busts.
Sure wish I knew what was different – it would be better to have more logs like the 160m ‘test. The ultimate goal is a 500 QSO CW contest log with zero errors.
When pigs fly…..for now I would be happy with a consistently low error rate.
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