I gathered manual (non-reversebeacon) spots from 9 Telnet cluster nodes
around the world over the 48-hour ARRL DX CW 2024 contest, deduped them,
and counted self-spots to see how widely self-spotting has been adopted, 14
months after the ARRL began allowing self-spotting by all entrants in ARRL
contests.
(Note that almost all other major HF contest sponsors do not allow
self-spotting and strictly forbid it!)
I also included as self-spots, the case where the spotting station(s) used
a different call than the spotted call. This was not at all rare; many
contesters used a special call for the contest but were, for example,
logged into the cluster with their regular call. Other DXpedition teams
seem to have specifically logged in to clusters and spotted using multiple
members home calls - a wise choice for when the target audience may have
excessively strict geographic filters on what spots they receive.
Only 134 stations self-spotted in this contest, if I ignore stations that
self-spotted themselves less than 10 times. There will be more than 5000
logs submitted for ARRL DX CW this year, so this is fewer than 3% of all
entrants who have adopted self-spotting. I'm honestly surprised the uptake
has been so low. In fact, the number of posts to cq-contest on the subject
of self-spotting in the past 14 months far exceeds the number of
self-spotters.
Top 10 self-spotters, and the calls they self-spotted under, are listed
below. The self-spot counts below are after some aggressive deduping - for
example if a station posted themselves on multiple frequencies in the same
minute I only counted it as a single self-spot. You can find a complete
list of all 134 stations, and the raw telnet cluster data, at
https://radiosport.world/2024arrlcw.html
The Top 10:
#self-
spots call spotted using calls
----- ------ -------------------
632 CR6K CR6K CT1ILT
449 V3T V31TP
427 S53M S53M
341 W4NF W4NF
340 AA3B AA3B
306 W3LPL W3LPL
267 MW4R MW4R
261 K3LR K3LR
244 PJ2T K8ND PJ2T W0CG W4EE
238 OM2VL OM2VL
Tim N3QE
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