I have some good news to report for contester users of CW Skimmer. I have
just finished a series of tests with Skimmer 1.4, to measure the
improvement in two areas important to contesters, in particular
· An excessive number of busted spots
· An excessive number of cases where a caller was mis-identified as a
runner and spotted when that should not have happened (called CQ/DE errors
below).
A little background first. Skimmer was originally intended primarily as a
DXing tool, to facilitate cracking pileups. In this application, speed of
identifying the desired station is a lot more important that whether or not
the program also generates some busted spots. Last summer, Alex released a
version of Skimmer that was intended to let users tailor Skimmer?s callsign
validation to fit their preferences. Four levels of validation were
offered: Minimal and Normal, intended primarily for DXers, and Aggressive
and Paranoid, intended largely for contesters.
Now here?s the good news. I tested version 1.3 and version 1.4 against a
10-minute excerpt from a recording of 40M, during the CQWPXCW last May,
using a May 2008 master.dta file and Aggressive call validation. I
listened to the recording for each spot that Skimmer made, and classified
them as OK, busts, and CQ/DE errors.
Here are the data:
Version 1.3 1.4 Improvement
Stations missed* -- 11 (of 92) --
Busts 21 0 (!) >99%
CQ/DE errors 15 3 80%
*legitimate CQ?s missed by the new version; in most cases, these stations
were very weak or were only heard to CQ once during the 10-minute sample,
for whatever reason.
For anyone who wants to try this for himself, Alex has made Version 1.4
available for download from <http://www.dxatlas.com/>www.dxatlas.com for a
30-day free trial. People who earlier downloaded a trial can do so again
with this version.
73, Pete N4ZR
the World Contest Station Database is back, and updated daily
www.conteststations.com
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