Great idea Mike!
I for one, am always looking for "constructive" criticisms. What better place
to get such than this reflector? :)
Here is our criteria for checking logs of the Calif QSO Party (CQP). I've
been doing this for several years. Two years ago I began writing software to
aid in this effort. CQP generates hundreds of logs to check so the task is
not trivial. I don't have a secretarial pool to enter data or to transcribe
scribbled logs into ascii. What has made this effort to semi-automate log
checking realistic is the sudden increase in what I refer to as "soft logs".
Those are ascii logs emailed to me, or floppies included with snail mailed
logs.
Up until recently, one good way to avoid penalties is to mail in paper logs
w/o a floppy. That won't work any more starting this year since I'll be able
to scan those logs into a machine readable form. If you hen scratch the log,
there will be massive scan errors .. to your detriment! Although the CQP
rules (see http://www.cqp.org) don't require a soft log, it will be in your
best interest to submit one.
The log checking process begins with entering claimed scores into an Excel
spreadsheet. That is put on the CQP web site almost daily so you can see very
quickly if you log has been received or lost.
Next, all logs must be converted into a common ascii format. Trey is
proposing a "standard" log format for various contests, and I wish him well
in that effort. It will certainly help me a lot if it succeeds. I'm always
amazed at how many different formats exist. I've seen about 20!
Now the fun starts. I don't trust my software to make any decisions about
penalties. There are simply too many circumstances to be able to identify and
code all possibilities. Therefore, I decided to write the software to be a
log checking TOOL. It is not the end in itself. The software cross checks all
QSOs and looks for any error. If an error is found, the program halts and
asks a HUMAN JUDGE to decide if the error is worthy of a penalty or not, and
how much of a penalty.
In CQP last year, we used seven judges. We divided the logs up between us,
had a meeting to establish common penalty critera, then went to it. Many
thanks to W6OAT, NF6S, N2ALE, N6DE, W6ISO, and K6III for volunteering their
time to this task.
The criteria we used for a "major" penalty was either multiple copying errors
(ie: busted both the call and the exchange), or NIL.
A "minor" penalty was given for any SINGLE copying error. This was usually
either a busted call or mis-copied serial number. We decided that a busted
call should not be any more serious an offense than any other copying error.
The reasoning was that we believed the QSO did actually take place, only the
call was mis-copied.
We decided that a unique call sign would be accepted without penalty if the
associated serial number was low (generally under 25). Of course, we agreed
to accept "59" and "599". We were also mindfull of the European FD, and the
VK/ZL contests going on during the same weekend, both of which could generate
uniques with high numbers.
As you can see, having a human judge was critical to our success. Writing a
program to account for all the possible variables is far above my head. There
were several other problems that had to be delt with. For example, some logs
had deleted dupes, then re-numbered the log. Disaster! Always log dupes and
keep them in your log !!!
All uniques required the judge to assume that this is a busted call, and to
attempt to discover what the correct call really was. The software has a
couple of utility routines that can search ALL logs for a certain variations
of a call (ex: W6OHP instead of W6OSP). This is not an exact science, but we
became fairly skilled at this and could deduce the correct call sign in about
80% of these cases. In the other 20%, we simply conceeded and allowed the QSO
without penalty.
What should the penalties be? Our proceedure allowed a "major" or a "minor"
penalty on every QSO. We set the "minor" penalty to equal 1/2 QSO, and the
"major" penalty to equal 1 QSO. This was partly because that this level of
detailed log checking is very new and is likely to cause a lot of flack. We
may re-visit this issue for this years' CQP.
Comments and suggestions welcome.
73, AL AD6E
cqp@contesting.com
1999 CQP is Oct 2&3 ... only 7 weeks to go !!
.... other good stuff deleted ...
>Relax. It'll get better. We are all new at this.
>I was speculating and probably wrong.
>The log checkers are likely grumbling at me right now!
>
>It might be useful if the log checking protocols were
>publicized. Don't know how hard that would be.
>Then those of us with logical minds might offer suggestions.
>
>> Bob,I2WIJ - J49WI
>>
>
>Ciao
>Mike N2MG
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