[TVARC] ARRL Contest Scoring for "ARRL International Digital Contest" (Contest ID: "ARRL-DIGI") & the 24 Hr vs. 8 Hr Category Overlay

[Anthony Hackenberg]

Hi Members of TVARC’s MailList (interested in contesting),

As others have already pointed out on TVARC's MailList (reflector), some logging applications for the “ARRL International Digital Contest” (ARRL-DIGI) do NOT calculate your score.  In my case, I used the “RUMlogDX” contest logger application (by Tom Linder/DL2RUM; BUT ONLY available for Apple MacOS) and it did calculate my score.  Apparently, other logging apps may, or may not, bother to calculate your score (since it depends so much on being able to calculate the distances between the grid squares, dividing by 500, and then handling round-offs correctly).

However, just go ahead and submit your Cabrillo-formatted logs to the ARRL's log submission “robot” without worrying about whether or not your have a “claimed score.”  This robot will “proof-read’ your log submission and calculate your raw score for this contest (and display it on the screen and in an e-mail sent to you).

CAUTION. However, do worry about the OVERLAY.  If you, like me, only worked 8 hours, or less, on the contest, then be sure your log submission correctly sets this overlay category to 8 hours (instead of 24 hours).  I forgot to do that on my first log submission to the ARRL robot; so, later I had to re-submit my log with this overlay corrected to 8 hours.  This will NOT affect your score.

In addition, logging applications may cause you another headache if they attempt to calculate your score for the ARRL-DIGI contest.  As Rich (and maybe others have hinted at), even the programs, like RUMlogDX, that do calculate your score seem to be producing SLIGHT discrepancies.  For example, the ARRL robot assigned me a raw score of 1,096; but RUMlogDX calculated my score as 1,105 (a discrepancy of 9 points for my total of 76 QSOs).  My suspicion is that since this contest is brand new this year, there maybe some kinks to get worked out in the scoring of the “plus” points that depend on the distances between the stations’ grid-squares.  I also suspect the logging applications may not all be using the EXACT same database as the ARRL’s robot does to calculate these distances.  In addition, rounding errors may be occurring in how these applications & the ARRL robot handle the rounding off of the result when the distances are divided by 500.


73,

Tony/K4QR
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