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IOTA Contest Page

In 2001 I took over the job of managing the IOTA Contest, the most popular event in the RSGB HF Contests calendar. The main source of information for the contest - rules, claimed scores, soapbox, photographs, final results and write-up - is the RSGB HF Contests Committee Web page at www.rsgbhfcc.org This page will contain occasional items of news related to the IOTA Contest, and other background information that may be of interest. To start the ball rolling, below is an article I write for the September 2003 CDXC (Chiltern DX Club, the UK DX Foundation) Digest, giving some background to what is involved in being IOTA Contest Manager.

IOTA contest rules - follow this link.

For information about the IOTA awards programme, which is quite separate from the IOTA Contest, but also run by the RSGB, look at the RSGB IOTA pages: www.rsgbiota.org

The results of the 2005 contest are now available and will appear in March RadCom. Check the RSGB HFCC web page for detailed scores, soapbox, and photos, or follow this link.

I’ve always been a keen contester and am what I would consider a casual IOTA chaser – if I’m in the shack I work them. The IOTA contest has always been a fun combination of contesting and IOTA chasing, and I’ve tried to join in whenever I could.

Having said all this, I was nevertheless rather taken aback just over two years ago when Justin G4TSH, Contests Committee Chairman, asked me if I would take over the adjudication! I had never adjudicated a contest, or even served on the Contests Committee. My main qualification for the job appeared to be that, with early retirement behind me, I might have the time to handle what is far and away the biggest of the RSGB’s contests.

I had very little idea what to expect. Chris G3SJJ, my predecessor, passed me various paperwork and statistics, but simply reading that the number of logs has increased to the level of over 1,000 a year simply didn’t prepare me for what that meant in practice! I made some preparations, but there was no "off the shelf" checking software available and I had very little idea of the form in which the various logs would be arriving.

As it turned out, once the contest was over there was a flood of electronic logs of many different descriptions, most e-mailed but some arriving by disc at RSGB, and there were still plenty of paper logs. Even this year, with 1150+ logs having arrived as I write this, 117 have come in on paper, and there will no doubt be more to follow (as the mailing deadline is past, I am assuming the arrival of e-mailed logs is almost at an end).

I am led to believe that my predecessors took the route of printing out the many logs, and checking them by looking through them for obvious broken calls, etc. But even if they were to spend 5 minutes on each log, that would be about 100 hours of work, even before coming back to rescore them, start the write-up for RadCom, etc. There had to be a better way! In any case, IOTA now stands up there with the major international contests such as CQWW and the ARRL DX events, so participants might reasonably expect a similarly rigorous approach to adjudication.

I spoke last year (2002) at the HF Convention about some of the steps I have been putting in place to automate the whole process. So let’s take a slightly different look at how my IOTA Contest Timetable works out.

Let’s start the cycle with the autumn HF Contests Committee meeting, at which the rules of the various contests are discussed. The timing is critical, as the Contesting supplement appears in January RadCom, so decisions and rewrites have to be done to a tight timescale. Let’s say some rule changes are agreed (last year we introduced a QRP category, but the main changes were to the recommendations for electronic logging, trying to steer participants towards the use of Cabrillo, which I have discussed in these pages before). Once the rule changes have been captured and gone to Rad Com, it’s time to consider what else needs to be put in place.

My main concern for the 2003 contest was to get some additional trophies sponsored, to reflect the increased number of participants over the years and the high profile the contest has achieved. I am delighted to say that a number of sponsors have come forward, and I'’ even more delighted that John G3LZQ has taken the Trophies side over lock, stock and barrel; he’ll do a great job and free me up to focus on other matters.

Other ongoing concerns have been to work with software writers to get Cabrillo implemented for the IOTA contest (EI5DI of SDI and LX1NO of LuxLog have worked closely with me but several other contest logging programs have, I’m pleased to say, followed their lead). Then there is the usual cycle of publicity, ensuring that the major Web sites, bulletins (especially the ARRL’s Contest rate Sheet) and national magazines are aware of the current rules, taking due cognisance of their publication lead times.

Running in parallel with this, I wanted to make improvements to the software side, so that the checking gets slicker and more comprehensive year on year. The previous year’s logs form an excellent database for trialling different routines.

Eventually the contest approaches, and I start to get a steady stream of e-mails from potential participants, usually asking for some sort of clarification of the rules, or simply notifying me of their intention to be on from some reasonably rare IOTA.

The contest itself passes quickly enough, though I tend to watch the PacketCluster and spend more time tuning than operating, just to get a feel for what is going on. Who is working stations three minutes before the contest is due to start (!), are any entrants operating in a manner which is against the letter or spirit of the rules. I’m not about to pull the plug on anyone at this stage, but I invariably get complaints about specific stations after the event, and it helps if I have a feel, from my own listening, as to whether these complaints are warranted.

By the end of the contest the logs will have started to arrive – I checked my e-mail a few hours before the end this year, and four 12-hour logs were already there! Over 300 logs had arrived within 48 hours of the contest finishing. It then drops steadily to about 25 a day, and peaks again during the few days up to the mailing deadline.

My first concern is to log in the entries as they arrive, capturing information such as island operated from, category, claimed score, address and, especially, e-mail address. This information will enable me to compile the Claimed Scores list for posting mid- to late-September, but also forms the basis for my master spreadsheet which I use for tracking everything, hopefully ensuring that no-one’s log disappears into a black hole. With many logs arriving as attachments called, for example, "iota2003" this is easily done – why, oh why, can’t people name their log "mycallsign.log". Mind you, the rules last year indicated that this should be done "e.g. g3xyz.log" and, lo and behold, I got a log from an LU station named "g3xyz.log"!

I send out quite a number of e-mails asking for clarification, especially about category. I can infer mode and time-operated from the log but entrants have to tell me their power category, for example. There is a school of thought among some members of the Contests Committee that such entrants should simply be defaulted to "High Power" or whatever, but I see my role as being a facilitator rather than a policeman, making the contest as inclusive as possible. In any case, IOTA is unique in that many entrants are IOTA chasers as against regular contesters, and don’t always know the contest "ropes".

This year I have been able to import most of the logs to my master database as they have arrived. This is largely because, despite some early protestations about Cabrillo on the various reflectors, it has been adopted by a very high proportion of entrants. Even those logs which are only Cabrillo-like, rather than fully compliant, are usually much easier for me to handle than the plethora of formats I was tending to get before.

In parallel, as the logs come in, I have been saving Soabox comments to a Word file, and photographs have been carefully archived (renaming as appropriate – I can only handle so many photos called iota2003.jpg...). Soapbox and photos go off to Justin G4TSH for posting on the HFCC Web page sometime during September.

Paper logs are sent to a small army of volunteers, who type them up. The number of paper logs reduces each year, but there are some entrants who, I suspect will never become PC-literate. Unfortunately, most tend to be of the older generation, and some of the handwriting gets more and more illegible as the years go by!

Once the database is ready (typically it will contain about 400,000 QSO records), the first step is to do a quick analysis to build tables of valid island stations, number of times each callsign appears in the logs (helps not only to identify uniques, but also to spot those active entrants who have failed to send in a log – maybe an e-mail will encourage them to at least send one in as a Checklog).

Further adjudication involves a complete cross-check of QSOs, where we have logs for both sides of the contact. This is a huge task and, frankly, was quite impossible with manual checking. Casual entrants will find that probably 80% or more of their QSOs can be cross-checked, as they will most likely have been working active contest stations who will certainly have sent in a log. But even for the "big boys" a very high percentage of contacts can be checked. This cross-checking took a whole weekend on G4VXE’s fast Pentium PC last year, and resulted in an output file of something like 18,000 QSOs where there were discrepancies and which therefore merited manual checking before deciding whether to disallow them.

18,000 sounds a lot, but is actually a relatively small percentage of overall QSOs, especially given the complexity of the IOTA contest exchange compared with many other contests. But I’d love to do more to reduce the number that actually require manual intervention!

Once the final adjudication has taken place, logs can be rescored and the results’ tables compiled. Then it’s merely a matter of adding the commentary and, lo and behold, it’s all set to go off to the Contests Committee for sanity-checking before being mailed to RadCom. A copy of the results also goes to G3LZQ (Trophies) and G3NKC (Certificates) to do their stuff. An electronic copy gets posted on the HFCC Web site, members-only pages initially until RadCom has appeared.

Of course, by this time we are already into the next year’s cycle – many of the logs contain comments on the rules, which I compile for the Committee’s rules’ discussion, for example. And this is where we came in ..

Somewhere behind all of this, software developments have also been taking place – my thanks to N5KO G4VXE G0WWW/5B4WN G4FON and others for working with me on these. By 2004 we should have Web-based submission as an option, saving me time with the collation of summary information. Anything which saves time, of course, will ultimately lead to faster final results. It will also free up more time for me and members of the HFCC to focus on discussing the philosophy of the checking process (there are lots of issues which really need to be properly discussed) rather than simply being bogged down month in and month out with the sheer mechanics of contest adjudication.

If you’ve stuck with me so far, please don’t think I have written the preceding to blow my own trumpet. Frankly, if I’d known how much work was involved, I might never have been persuaded to take the job on. But I think it’s interesting to those who take part in contests to have some idea of what goes on behind the scenes – multiply what I have described by a factor of four or more for major contests such as CQWW and WPX. It might also explain why, given that the whole process relies on volunteers, things occasionally go wrong. Happy contesting!

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