I tried out www.constestonlinescore.com for the CQ WW VHF Contest. It worked well for this VHF contest but I’ll bet it is spectacular for HF contests. It would also be great fun for club competitions where you could track your results against other members.
Introduction to the Online Scoreboard
Craig Thompson, K9CT, recently provided a VHF Contesting presentation to the Front Range 6 Meter Group. He did a great job providing insight into his contest operations, which are at an incredibly high level. He also provided some insight into the online scoreboard.
What I particularly liked was his hour by hour comparison of his activity versus what he felt was his main competitor George Fremin, K5TR. From this he found a few hours where K5TR was not making QSOs while K9CT continued to rack up QSOs. This was the primary difference in their scores.
Online Scoreboard Set Up
Set up was way easier than I had anticipated. Just register on the website and then in N1MM Logger+ under the configuration menu and Score Reporting, enter your username and password and check Report Real-Time Score to Server. All the directions are on the Online Scoreboard website.
That got things working but I found that the scoreboard was reporting my entry as Single Operator All Band Low Power and not Rover. I sent them a message and Victor, VA2WA, responded. He noted that N1MM doesn’t send any Rover information. So he set up a “Rover” note when a call sign showed up at /R. This was very helpful and generous for the small segment of rovers in only a few contests.
View into the System
As you might imagine, online scoring is just starting out and VHF contests will always be a trailing effort compared to the huge HF contests. For comparison CQ WW SSB has 38,000+ entries, CQ WW VHF 750+ entries.
Here’s the overall screen shot from the top of the scoreboard after the contest completed. Note the one rover in the listing. I only examined this after the contest. But think about the value of comparing scores in real time during the contest.
Here’s a breakdown of my activity level over the course of the contest.
This was for All bands. You can also get a breakdown by each band. Think about monitoring your competition in an HF contest to see how they are changing bands to address propagation changes. There are some fascinating possibilities here.
This next shot is my activity level during the contest. You can clearly see when I packed up the station and headed home for the night as well as when I started up the next morning.
And, here’s probably the more interesting view with my score by hour compared to W5PR, who I selected because I could not find any other rovers on the results list.
The fun thing would be to monitor this during the contest. I’m sure it would motivate me to work longer into the night and get up earlier in the morning for the VHF contests. It could possibly get me to do an overnighter for an HF contest.
It was simple enough to implement. Try it out for your contest efforts.
