UK/EI DX SSB Contest - 5/6th December 2015
Commentary from the Adjudicators - Chris GM3WOJ/GM2V and Paul EI5DI 9th December 2015
Thanks for your interest in the first-ever UK/EI DX SSB Contest. We first proposed this format about 4 years ago as an RSGB event, but for various reasons it has taken until now for the first event to take place, run by the small but enthusiastic UKEICC team.
Some background information that you might (or might not!) find interesting ......
There are quite a few difficulties to be overcome when organising a new contest. Firstly - is there actually any demand for a UK/EI-centric HF contest? We asked as many fellow UK and EI contesters as we could and also remembered the overwhelming show of hands in favour of such an event during the Contest Forum at the RSGB Convention in 2012. UKEICC members were also asked in an online survey - overall the answers were a clear 'Yes'.
Secondly - formulating the Rules. We wanted the contest to be as interesting as possible for all entrants, yet retaining the importance of working UK and EI stations for Multipliers. Drawing up the Rules took several months of detailed discussions - there are many good examples of Contest Rules out there, so we were not afraid to copy good ideas. After this first running of the contest, we realise that we need to 'tweak' some of the Rules slightly, so we will do this before the CW event in January 2016. The Rules were then published online early in 2015 for UKEICC members to study and make comments. From the start we wanted to make the Adjudication process after the contest entirely automated, so the Rules were written with this aim in mind.
Next - choosing dates. This is a much more difficult task than you might think. There are so many major and minor HF contests nowadays that almost every weekend out of the 52 has some clash with other events. After much deliberation we chose dates in early December (not ideal - one week after CQ WW CW) and a weekend in January 2016 (which happens to have 5 weekends) The key points are to avoid clashes with other well-established contests on the same mode, to try to find a slot in the autumn or spring when DX propagation is better, etc.
In May 2015, once we had largely finalised the Rules, Contest Logging software writers were approached and asked to include the UKEICC DX contests in their next update - some reacted quickly, some took a few weeks, some did not include these contests so far.
We then approached 2 software experts - one to organise a dedicated online log submission robot and the other to write dedicated adjudication software for these contests. We then uploaded about 50000 test QSOs via the robot and ran the adjudication software numerous times to check for functionality. All this took place over a period of months, with hopefully most of any possible 'bugs' being found and fixed. However, this is leading-edge software so some hidden problems or unexpected combinations of events are still to be expected. Our philosophy is simple 'some you win, some you lose' - in other words you may feel that you lost some points unfairly, but conversely you may have gained some points you did not really deserve. The software will be improved after every event but is already as accurate as we can make it.
Publicity - next we had to 'advertise' these DX Contests as widely as possible. We did this via the GB2RS News Bulletin, WA7BNM , SM3CER, etc online Contest Calendars, items in RadCom and other radio magazines, items on websites, postings on various e-mail reflectors, announce messages on the DX Cluster, via Twitter, etc etc. Despite all our efforts, a surprising number of entrants during the contest seemed to be initially unaware of what the contest was about and/or had not read the Rules.
Sponsorship - another step was to approach potential sponsors. We were very pleased to have 2 trophies sponsored and various plaques - see the Awards webpage. We hope to add more Trophies, plaques, individual sponsors, etc. for future events. PDF Certificates have been prepared for e-mailing to Winners in all of the categories.
One of the final steps was to ask DX friends to translate our Rules into other languages - these translations were then uploaded to the website to attract as many DX entrants as possible. At the moment they are in English + 9 other languages. We hope to add Chinese and Ukrainian soon. We were not confident that Google Translate would do a good enough job.
The first UK/EI DX SSB Contest
Three factors combined to give the new contest a difficult start. Firstly, the event was the weekend after the CQ WW CW weekend, so many contesters would possibly be tired or a bit reluctant to take part in another contest so soon after this major 48-hour event. Quite a few UK/EI ops had been at DX locations for CQ WW CW, so would have been travelling home. Secondly, wide areas of the UK were badly effected by storm Desmond, which caused widespread flooding and damage and resulted in many contesters having to keep their towers wound down or antennas lowered for safety. Lastly, the Sun decided to add to the problems with aurora and the K-index at 4 at the start of the contest. (Here near Inverness I found 21MHz full of what I thought was solar noise - about S5-S7 for most of the contest, making copying weaker stations difficult)
Despite the poor propagation, quite a lot of good DX was worked over the 24 hours and the winning station made 773 QSOs in 12 hours of operation. As mentioned above, it seemed that a number of (UK mostly) stations did not know what exchange to send - it was easy enough to help them by saying 'first 2 letters of your postcode' although this is not correct for all district codes, but most of them.
Propagation improved on the Sunday morning although the bands remained noisy. 10m was patchy at my QTH, with only a few dozen QSOs possible. One observation I made was that many of the UK stations that I worked were not callsigns I recognised, not regulars in any of the RSGB CC events and often not even in the SCP file. I am not quite sure why this was, but it was good to know that the new contest had possibly attracted some newcomers to contesting, or some older contesters who liked the sound of our new UK/EI DX Contest format.
The automated adjudication procedures
The UKEICC team regard contest adjudication as a data processing exercise, which makes the task very suitable for automation using suitable software. Our underlying simple philosophy (repeated as above) is 'some you win, some you lose' - in other words you may feel that you lost some points unfairly, but conversely you may have gained some points you did not really deserve. Our aim is to minimise the amount of human intervention required, without any significant loss of accuracy, which in turn results in an ability to publish the Results very quickly.
We have been using automated adjudication with the UKEICC 80m contests for 15 months now, without any major problems. This 80m contest adjudication software has been slowly refined over this period of time and we now think it is very accurate. (Some of the features of the new DX contest software are going to be implemented in the next version of the 80m software) We find that the 80m contesters really like the speedy results online and the instant e-mailed UBN reports. The entrants also don't tend to argue with the software, usually accepting their score, whereas they might have argued with a human adjudicator :-)
We believe that these new UK/EI DX Contests are fairly unique amongst current contests - having a short log-submission deadline (currently 2 hours), fully automated adjudication, results published online immediately, UBN files e-mailed to entrants very quickly and the logs and UBN files online within a few days. (CQ WW have really improved the speed of their results in recent years, with the raw scores of thousands of entrants being online only a week after the contest - impressive)
Despite all our careful software testing, we still anticipated some problems with this first 'real-life' run of the software and we did get some problems. Fortunately they turned out to be minor ones, fairly easily fixed - well done our software writers! Here are the issues we have been looking at over the past couple of days : 1. A change in the log submission robot Cabrillo headers resulted in everyone being labelled as 'Assisted' in the first Results table. 2. A small bug in the Adjudication software resulted in some QSOs with non-entrants being awarded Zero points. 3. We kept the Results as 'Provisional' while we examined one entry carefully. 4. The N1MM+ default exchange is 001 AB. Some entrants, possibly using N1MM+ for the first time, did not change this to 001 'my district code', so although on-air they were sending the correct code, their submitted Cabrillo logfiles had moved them all to bonnie Aberdeen!
One thing we should have done and will be doing in the next few days, is publishing online, in advance, the 'rules' that our adjudication software applies to all the logfiles during the automated adjudication process. For example, quite a few entrants lost points due to 'time violations' - this was caused by either the entrant, or the other station, not logging the QSO at the same time i.e. within a window +/-5 minutes as defined in our adjudication software 'rules', for whatever reason. [ 14th Dec. Click here to read these software 'rules' ]
We have still been receiving one or two logfiles 24 hours after the contest - we will e-mail these entrants thanking them for their logs but pointing out the 2-hour deadline and explaining why we will use their logfiles this time to increase the accuracy of the results, but in future will reclassify all late entries as Checklogs. This may sound harsh, but the whole point of developing automated adjudication procedures is to be able to process the logfiles quickly and publish the results quickly, which many entrants have commented positively about.
We are looking forward to the CW event on 23/24th January 2016. There is quite a lot to do before then e.g. sorting out and publishing the SSB Award winners, contacting N1MM+ to request some changes, contacting the WinTest authors to ask again if they can include these contests, making some changes to the log-submission robot and further software improvements, etc. We hope to have every entrant's logfile and UBN file online by next weekend.
Please send any comments and/or suggestions to [email protected] and we will respond a.s.a.p. 73 Chris GM3WOJ / GM2V