[RRDXA] WRTC2018 Team Selection Critera Released

[Christian Janssen DL1MGB]

The WRTC2018 Organizing Committee is pleased to announce the Team 
Selection Criteria for the WRTC 2018. A committee led by Ulf, DL5AXX, 
worked very hard and had long discussions to create this new set of rules.

There will be 49 Team Leaders selected through qualifying events between 
February 2015 and November 2016. As a special highlight we want to give 
three Youth Teams the chance to fight the battle together with the big ones.

The feedback we received from many previous competitors ended up in less 
qualifying events and total qualification time. In total there are 32 
qualifying events, 30 for DL, 28 for the rest of Europe and 26 for the 
rest of the world.

The total of the 12 best event scores will be used for qualifying.

Some other highlights:
* New qualifying contests are WAG and IARU R1 FD

* Reduction of Single-Op categories to SO HP and SO LP

* The weighting factors of the Multi-Op categories were reduced and the 
maximum of 4 Event Scores from Multi-Ops are possible now. We decided to 
go this way because we are not looking for the best 10-person MS oder 
25-person MM team, but for the best two-man team. Of course there is no 
special WRTC class in the big contests and the team leader qualifies at 
first, so the logical step is to emphasize the Single-Op categories.

The defending champions N6MJ and KL9A will receive the only automatic 
place in WRTC2018. The Organizing Committee has reserved some wild card 
slots to allow invitations of exceptional qualifiers who did not 
otherwise earn a place through the qualifying process.

With the claimed scores of the first qualifying event (ARRL 
International DX Contest CW 2015) we will provide qualifications 
standings on our website. More information about this later.

View the Team Selection Criteria at http://wrtc2018.de/en/qualifying

The WRTC2018 Organizing Committee
http://wrtc2018.de