[RMVHF] playing with the numbers

[Steve London]

Phil Krichbaum wrote:
> Nate,
> At that time we 
> thought electric pencil sharpeners were high tech!

It was even worse than that. WB5VZL (now K5TR) wrote an article in the 
early-80's comparing different kinds of pencils, pencil leads, and erasers !

>    After the contest, several ops would take home the logs from a band 
> and over the next few weeks make a new dupe sheet. As the deadline got 
> close we would meet at K9MWM's office with everyone and go over the 
> logs, double checking for 10 minute violations in the MS category. After 
> we were fairly far into the evening, we would order some Pizza and have 
> a few adult beverages. I'm sure we spent more man hours double checking 
> the dupe sheets etc after the contest than we put in operating the 
> contest. Even having the op there who logged it initially didn't solve 
> all the hand writing issues.

Yup...I would say it took at least 30 minutes of post-contest work for every 
hour actually operated during the contest.

And, please, let's be careful to differentiate the log-submission robot system, 
from the actual checking of the logs. They are two different processes supported 
by different groups of people. Making either of them work is not a trivial task. 
For example, think about the different ways that participants indicate the club 
they want their scores to be credited to, such as:

Grand Mesa Contesters of Colorado
Grand Mesa Contesters
GMC
GMCC

Now multiply this by the number of clubs that submit scores, and you can start 
to appreciate how hard it is just to do something "simple" like club aggregate 
scores.

73,
Steve, N2IC