The CQ WW Contest has been making submitted logs public for many years. The last two WPX surveys indicated that WPX participants wanted the same.
There are several reasons for open logs.
- They can be a great learning tool. How did the competition beat me? What can I do differently next year?
- They can help us understand our mistakes. What call did the guy work that I though was working me?
- They are a source of propagation and activity data that can be analyzed. There are number of web sites that use the CQWW log data to show interesting charts or analysis. We want the same thing for the WPX Contest.
Not everyone is in favor of open logs. But, as we saw in the recent WPX Survey results, there is a significant majority (over 85%) that do want to see the logs. In a sport where so much is done from the privacy of our own stations, the transparency of open logs promotes fair play and sportsmanship.
Getting to public logs was a process. First, we had to introduce a rule for the 2010 contest that notified entrants their log may be made public.
XIV. Declaration: By submitting an entry in the CQ WPX Contest you agree that: 1) you have read and understood the rules of the contest and agree to be bound by them, 2) you have operated according to all rules and regulations of your country that pertain to amateur radio, 3) your log entry may be made open to the public, and 4) all actions and decisions of the WPX Contest Committee are official and final.
That cleared the way for us to publish the logs.
While everyone wants to see open logs, they don’t want to see their email and postal address made public. Thanks to some programming help from David, K2DSL, we have a way to process all logs and remove the ADDRESS and EMAIL fields. We went one step more and removed any line beginning with “X-” as these are added by various logging programs to store information including email addresses. David also cleverly looks inside the soapbox and blanks out anything that looks like an email address.
We also made the committment that we would not publish logs that were submitted as CHECKLOG. These logs are very valuable to the log checking process, but the participants do not want their logs to be scored or results published. It seems only fair that we not publish their logs as well.
The logs for the WPX SSB Contest 2010 are now published to the web site. Visit http://www.cqwpx.com/publiclogs/
Or you can get there by going to the Results tab and selecting the Public Logs button.
The CW logs will be posted some time in January after the log checking has been completed.
