Numbers Cruncing – CQWW SSB 2021 @ CQ3W

How it all started ……

One of my first REAL contest efforts, I have organized a trip to PJ2T in 2005 for WPX SSB with a bunch of German operators. We called it “the german invasion on Curacao”.

We had the goal to beat the old Worldrecord in the M/2 category from ST0RY and of course WIN! Everything looked pretty good, we archived the number we thought we would be able to archive. We had a god time and ended up right on target. Just a small Party at the coral cliff hotel after the contest – everything was cool until we saw TS3A posting a score above PJ2T the other day.

Endless waiting from March until Christmas (!) when I got the message from Geoff W0CG – WE ARE World #1 above TS3A and had a new world record! The rest is history.

What happened? We had a clean log and fewer deduction than TS3A. LESSON LERNED!

It does not make sense to log a QSO when you are not sure you got it right! Ever since then I am monitoring my personal error rate and also for the teams I managed.

Recently:

CQ WW SSB 2019 D4C D4C claimed world #2 and ends up world #1 after log check.

CQ WPX RTTY 2021 LX7I SO/20m – Claimed scores only world #2 – final scores world #1  

And how could it happened again?

CQ WW SSB 2021 I ended up world #2 behind 9Y4W but the numbers were really close.

In January I already got the proposed log check result with me error rate at 2.0% and  6.8 % reduction.

With that knowledge I created a small excel sheet with the maximum reduction 9Y4D can take to stay above me and I also had DL2ARD in my back and I wanted to know how good he must be to pass me in the log check!

9Y4D must be better than 7.75 to stay above

DL2ARD needs to be better than 4.3 to pass me

The next question was – how good are these guys normally?

I know that Oliver DL2ARD usually has pretty clean logs, but no Idea about 9Y4D.

With the open logs policy at CQ magazine it was easy to find their past claimed scores and compare it with the final results.

The conclusion was that 9Y4D NEVER was better than 9.2% and as expected Oliver DL2ARD has reduced his error rate over the years! So this could be really tight but I assumed to find another 2% and go down to 4.3 % reduction would be a tough if not impossible task.

So since January there was some numbers supported hope to get the world number 1 spot @ CQ WW SSB 2021 SOA 15m !!

Endless waiting till April 1’st and here it is:

Thanks for all the callers!

73

Helmut