Winter VHF/UHF Field Day - 24 / 25 June 2017.
#12
I received an email a few days ago with some provisional 2017 Winter FD results plus an additional attachment that contained the following information :

The 'features' introduced in the Summer field day for Division 2, a 10% penalty for logging Maidenhead locators incorrectly, and a 2 points penalty for claiming a station as portable when a log from that station indicated that it was a home station, have also been applied in this field day.

There was again a large number of incorrectly logged locators in this field day. VKCL fills in the locator for a repeat contact with a station from previous contact, which saves typing if the locator had not changed and was correctly logged the first time. If not correctly logged or became incorrect through editing, all or many following contacts with that station would have incorrect locators. This appears to have happened many times again in this field day.

Incorrectly copied exchanges which are 'off by one' are still most predominant, accounting for almost half of the number these of errors. There is some indication that it is not always the fault of the receiving station, it seems that sometimes an incorrect exchange is announced by the sending station, mis-reading the next number to send. In this field day, 'off by one' exchanges were therefore ignored, but in future they will be listed in each stations report. (Copying own sent number as received number also happened a number of times.)

Similarly, contact time stamps at the two stations are sometimes significantly different, although in this field day there has been some improvement. A five minute tolerance should be sufficient, and in future, it is proposed to penalise contacts where tolerance is exceeded and it is possible to identify the station at fault, which is in most cases. If using VKCL, the contact should be saved as soon as all information has been entered before doing anything else, such as, exchanging pleasantries or making a sked for another band.

73,
Mike,  VK3AVV,          16th July 2017
VHF-UHF Field Day Contest Management Software Developer

What all that means is that it is not sufficient to just log a contact. It must be accurately logged : time, band, callsigns (including a /P as applicable), numbers exchanged, grid square data...

I plead guilty of the breach : "A five minute tolerance should be sufficient, and in future, it is proposed to penalise contacts where tolerance is exceeded and it is possible to identify the station at fault, which is in most cases. If using VKCL, the contact should be saved as soon as all information has been entered before doing anything else, such as, exchanging pleasantries or making a sked for another band.", probably more times than I should admit to. I simply forget to press the Enter key a few times to ensure that the data is saved before paying attention to the next call or band change. That makes the logged time in error by a variable margin.

The "The 'features' introduced in the Summer field day for Division 2, a 10% penalty for logging Maidenhead locators incorrectly, and a 2 points penalty for claiming a station as portable when a log from that station indicated that it was a home station, have also been applied in this field day."  bit I am not sure about. Some stations do not announce whether portable or home at the beginning when you are at the stage of entering the callsign into VKCL, and, much to my detriment, found a bug in the software when I went back to edit QSOs to add a /P as was relevant. Wrong Grid Squares - well, sometimes you just hear or type them dyslexically !!


It is not my place to release those provisional results and I am not doing so here.  They will be posted here (WIA web site) in due course, once official.

The next 2017 VHF/UHF Field Day is November 25 & 26th - the Spring FD. 

73 Doug VK4ADC
Doug VK4ADC @ QG62LG51
http://www.vk4adc.com

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