edited 10/02/2007, kaz
A couple of things made me curious enough to wonder what a plot of 10 meter QSO’s versus sunspot numbers would look like. So I gathered QSO data from W3LPL’s ARRL DX contests as posted to the 3830 reflector. Frank posted the QSO breakdown by band, which is what I wanted. The result is no surprise, but I found it interesting anyway. The results may appear in some future edition of the PVRC newsletter.
I have also put the article up as a static page on my website. This has the original article with a bit of supplemental information.
I originally thought I could use data from the QST write-ups on the ARRL DX contests, but in 2000 the quit including the band break downs in the listings–even in the web-only versions of the articles! So much for the ‘saving paper’ excuse. That forced me to the 3830 claimed scores, and W3LPL was the first I found that had consistently posted scores over the last decade. Still, I was f0rced to mix in one SSB score to get a complete data set.
So my graph’s aberration in 2002 is due to the SSB contest being skewed in favor of the higher bands. The 2002 W3LPL CW QSO total was HIGHER–but I’m sure they had more CW QSO’s on 80 ond 40 meters, and probably fewer on 15 and 10 meters. That would be a reasonable assumption, since it holds true for other years, and its just plain easier to make more CW contacts than SSB Q’s on 40 and 80.
In hindsight, I think the claimed raw QSO number is the better choice for the graph. It shows all QSO’s worked instead of the QSO’s that were verified to contest specific rules.
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