[PaQSO] CQ vrs S&P

[jimk8mr at aol.com]

There are several major differences between CQP and PAQP. The biggest two are the result of geography.


1. California does not count California counties as multipliers for California stations. This is geography in action: if they did, and people in California were busy trying to work all the CA counties, they wouldn't be working anybody outside California, other than maybe people in AZ, NV, and OR. In PA (as well as other nearby states like OH, NY, MI, etc.) one can work in state counties and at the same time work people in about half of the country. The same geographic consideration for California applies in Florida as well.


2. Mobiles (and rovers if they existed) are not a big factor in California. Counties out there are big: San Bernadino county is over 20,000 square miles - almost half the size of PA. Inyo county is over 10,000 square miles. The smaller, rare, counties in northern California are in mountainous areas where there aren't a lot of roads to choose from to get from one county to another, and are often down in valleys. Not good for mobile operations. Plus many of the rare California counties are hundreds of miles from the big cities. From almost anywhere in PA one can be in a rare county in less than an hour.


3. California does NOT require a summary sheet. They accept email Cabrillo logs with no summary sheet. What they now prefer is a web submission, where you enter some basic information about you and your entry category (but not about how you did in the contest). We now do this in Ohio, which catches a lot of errors such as the common mistake where people using N1MM try to submit a Cabrillo log showing their sent exchange as "OH" rather than their county. Our robot rejects such logs, and sends back an email requesting the correction. This process saves us a lot of time and effort when we get around to checking the logs. 


4. California does a somewhat odd multiplier list for out of state multipliers in order to have 58 multipliers for in-state stations, the same number as the 58 California counties. 50 states (including California) and 8 Canadian areas, essentially VE1-8, where VE1 includes all the Maritime provinces plus Newfoundland and Labrador, and VE8 includes the three northern territories (Yukon, NWT, and NU) as a single multiplier. PA's treatment of Canada is also rather odd: three multipliers for the northern territories (which are not RAC sections) from which there is never any activity anyway, but only one multiplier for Ontario, which is now four RAC sections.


There of course are a lot of other differences - digital modes, bonus stations, etc. - which fall under the classification of "Viva la difference".




73  -  Jim  K8MR




-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Coslo <mjcn3li at gmail.com>
To: paqso <paqso at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wed, Oct 14, 2015 6:16 pm
Subject: Re: [PaQSO] CQ vrs S&P


> On Oct 14, 2015, at 5:00 PM, Al Z <zelna.alz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Why not
just look to the most popular state QSO parties to see how their
> rules compare
and contrast to that of PA?  KISS
> On Oct 14, 2015 4:57 PM, "n3xls at juno.com"
<n3xls at juno.com> wrote:

> 
Sounds like a good idea, Al

Let’s look at the
California QSO Party, the biggest party in the country. I was a little
surprised. 

Here are their rules:

http://cqp.org/Rules.html

Short version -
what I gleaned from their ruleset:

As far as I can see, the basics are very
similar, but we have a lot more features. We do try to keep things less
stringent for people, our philosophy is get on the air and make contacts and
have fun.

They run 30 hours contiguous but you can only operate 24 of them.

We
run 23 hours broken up.

Objective -  Same as ours - instate works everyone and
OOS and DX work instate.

We allow spotting, they have assisted class if you use
it.

We accept paper logs, ADIF - when I can translate it - and Excel files.
They accept Cabrillo only.

QSO Points -  Phone = 2 points CW = 3.points

We
give our CW Ops more points per contact (1 SSB 2 CW)@ 2X versus 1.5X

They do
not have RTTY or PSK -  we do

Multipliers  - They do States we do Sections

OOS
is very similar - unless they changed a couple years ago, I based our VE mults
on CAQSO.

note they do not use the new Ontario sections either.

Counties They
have 58, and we have 67.

They use 4 letter counties, we use 3 letter
counties.

Scoring:

CW points plus Phone times multipliers

They have a “County
Expedition” class that is similar to our portable station

We have county lines,
they do not.

We have Rovers, they do not

Mobile - we have two classes, they
have one

They have school, YL, Youth, and New Contester

We have a first-timer
mostly similar to the New Contester.

both have club competitions

We have a a
lot of plaque classes they do not.

But the biggest surprise for me was,
especially since I have taken so much heat for having summary sheets AT ALL - 
is right here:

http://robot.cqp.org/cqp/logsubmit-form.html

A summary sheet.
Their's is html, ours is pdf.



- 73 Mike N3LI -