RoPoCo CW

For the past five years entries to this contest have been 46, 47 or 48, unfortunately 2014 did not keep up this trend as there were only 37 entries from just 51 callsigns in the logs.  There appears to be no obvious reason for this and the result was a very quiet last half hour for most entrants.  However, logging accuracy is the key feature of this contest and despite the lower numbers of QSOs there was no significant improvement with a mean error rate of 2.1.

The general lack of stations to work meant that many entrants had very similar totals so accuracy became the primary differential, particularly at the top of the table.  This year we have therefore an unusual result of seven entrants in a tie for first place and four of those are joint winners of the G3XTJ Memorial Trophy for the highest placed most accurate logs.  Congratulations to Graham Wood G3VIP, Nick Totterdell G4FAL, Ray Goff G4FON and Ed Taylor GW3SQX who had no errors in their logs.  They are joined by G4RCG, G5LP and GW0GEI who receive first place certificates.  There were just three other error-free logs from G3RFH, G3ZGC and M0NQN.

Propagation was found by many participants to be poor with signals that were often weak with deep QSB.  Not surprisingly there were a number of ‘not in log’ errors which are most likely abandoned QSOs at one end due to QRM or QSB.  The other cause of this error is where the station logged is actually working someone else and the post code in the received column often confirms this.  As usual by far the most common cause of losing points was in received postcode followed by callsign and RST mistakes.

The G5MY Trophy for the highest aggregate score over the two RoPoCo contests in 2014 is awarded to Steve Jones GW0GEI with a clear lead over the challengers.

John Cockrill G4CZB