The 24-Hour DX Contest Challenge

A proposal for a contest within a contest

The February survey question on www.contesting.com asked for general reaction to the idea of a �contest with a contest�, or CWC � an award or awards in categories not covered by the contest sponsors, using logs from the larger event as the basis for determining the winner. This led quickly to a discussion on the CQ-Contest reflector about the possibility of a 24-hour CWC piggybacking on either CQWW or the ARRL DX Contest, and that in turn leads us now to propose a test of the idea.
Both of these contests are 48-hour events with no operating time limits. Our idea was to encourage more activity in these contests by designing a CWC that rewarded operators who don�t feel able to go the full 48 hours (or something close to it), and who consequently only operate a few hours in these major events, or enter as single-band contestants only. In some parts of the world, operating the full time requires missing work on the Friday before or the Monday after the contest. For some of us, encroaching age or conflicts with family responsibilities make 48-hour contests less appealing.

We quickly settled on a 24-hour category as a good test. The next question was whether to require a continuous period, or permit off-times (like Sweepstakes, or the ARRL 10-Meter contest, to name two popular examples). Since the objective is to increase interest and activity, we felt that an approach that gave operators world-wide, maximum flexibility to set their operating times would best meet that need. Nobody would need to miss one of the peak high-band operating times, for example, simply to fit into an arbitrary 24-hour window; conversely, to win in this category would require raking in low-band QSOs and multipliers, and the decision-making would add an interesting element of strategy.

Initially, the idea encountered a certain amount of skepticism. Of the doubts, the one that we take most seriously is the view that a 24-hour CWC would tend to reduce activity rather than increase it, because some serious ops who now participate for more than 24 hours would limit their operating time to compete for the new prize, and they might outnumber those who would increase their hours of operating because of the incentive of the 24-hour award. It�s not possible, a priori, to judge whether this is right or not, so at the suggestion of Sylvan Katz, VE5ZX, who manages the surveys on www.contesting.com, a new survey has been posted for the month of March, which simply asks,

If a 24-hour category were introduced in CQWW or ARRL DX contests, would you:

operate more time []

operate less time []

it wouldn't affect me []


If the survey results appear to support the idea that a 24-Hour Challenge would help activity (or even be neutral), then we propose to go ahead with the first such CWC to coincide with the CQWW Phone and CW DX Contests in the fall. None of what follows is final, but we�re thinking of offering a plaque for the best 24-hour score to the top Single Op Unassisted in each contest, as well as publishing the results on the Internet. More plaques in more categories could be made available if a sponsor were to come forward. The total time could be made up of up to 6 periods, with minimum off-times of at least 30 minutes between logged QSOs.

A station would enter by sending us (the organizers) his log at the same time he sent it to the CQWW Committee. We would process the log to make sure it met the time criteria, and publish a list of the entrants on the Internet. To help us understand the impact of such a new category being offered, we would probably ask entrants to tell us, in the soapbox section of the Cabrillo file, what category they operated in last year, how many hours they put in, and whether the change was due to the availability of a new category. These things could be added to the Cabrillo file with a simple text editor after submission to CQWW. Actual log content would be maintained in confidence, just as is now the case. When CQ publishes the scores, we would announce the winner based on CQ�s log checking, post results on a web site, and a plaque (or plaques) would go out. Simple.

That�s the idea in a nutshell -- a two-stage test, and evaluation of the outcome afterward. We won�t know if it�ll work till we try it.

Pete Smith, N4ZR
Mike Gilmer, N2MG

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