RSGB Contest Committee

Club Calls Contest 2004

This year has seen increased support for club-oriented events in general and Club Calls was no exception with 10% more entries than last year. A further 50+ stations were active (including some well-known club calls) but did not submit logs.

Logs were received on paper (hand-written, printed, photo-copied pages from the station log etc.), and on disk and by e-mail in every conceivable format. Electronic standardisation proved to be impracticable and, eventually, all the logs were printed out and every QSO was checked by hand - a very time-consuming business!
The callsign of one station operating portable was recorded by 15% of his contacts without the ‘/P’. A callsign error is normally taken to be the fault of the receiving station but, in this case, it was obvious that the sending station was to blame and he was penalised accordingly.
It was also obvious that many stations were not consistent in giving out their club name and this was taken into account in the checking.
The scoring for this event may not be the simplest, but it still came as a surprise to find that 31 of the 119 logs contained arithmetic errors (all logs are re-scored by the adjudicator as a matter of course). The majority of these resulted in the log being underscored, in some cases by as many as 400 points!

In first place, and winner of the Ariel Trophy, was the Newbury & DARS station G5XV/P, operated by 2E0BJM, 2E0LRC, G1SSL and G3ZGC. In second place, representing Cheltenham ARA and just 61 points adrift, was the leading individual club member, G4ERP. The final podium place was taken by the Wigtownshire ARC station, GM4RIV/P, operated by GM3JKS and GM3MOU.
The David Hill G4IQM Memorial Trophy, for the highest 5-station aggregate score, was won by Cheltenham ARA with 6866 points, by a comfortable margin over second-placed Horsham ARC with 6123 points.
The certificate for the highest-scoring non-club-member goes to Mike Price, G6HOU.

Steve Knowles G3UFY