Unofficial Station Reports, ARRL DX SSB and CW, 2018 to 2021

 

Using the public logs, it is rather easy to generate unofficial station-by-station reports for the entrants in the ARRL DX contests.

The ARRL generates official reports and generally makes these reports available individually to each entrant. But these are not made public. The unofficial reports, while not necessarily identical to the official ones, may therefore hold some interest.

The unofficial reports may differ from the official ones because the contest committee has access to checklogs, which are not made public. Also, there are various pathological occurrences in logs that require a decision to be made as to how to classify one or more QSOs; the rules by which such decisions are made are not public, so the decisions that I made when constructing the unofficial reports may well be different from those made by the ARRL. Nevertheless, pathological logs (or pathological QSOs within a log) are relatively rare, so these decisions should affect a relatively small percentage of logs and QSOs. (Typical examples [there are many more] of circumstances in which decisions must made be are: by how much may clocks be skewed and a QSO still be considered valid? what to do if the transmitted callsign changes for some number of QSOs in the contest? what do to if more than one entrant claims to have used the same transmitted callsign?)

The complete set of unofficial reports for the CW and SSB versions of the ARRL DX contest for the years 2018 to 2021 may be found in appropriately named files in this directory.

I note that despite explicitly informing me that they would do so (in 2017), the ARRL have never made public the logs that they hold for the ARRL DX contests for years prior to 2018.

One note regarding interpretation of the information in these unofficial reports: all the fields should be self-explanatory, except that in the listing for EXCHANGE BUSTS, some values are enclosed in parentheses: this indicates that the worked station did not submit a log, and the value of the exchange sent by that station was deduced from QSO: lines in the logs of other entrants.

For example, the report for HL2ZN in the 2021 ARRL DX CW contest contains the line (the line below may be wrapped on your display):

QSO: 14000 CW 2021-02-21 2245 HL2ZN         599 0500   N7DR          599 KY      [ (CO) ]

This indicates that we can deduce that HL2ZN probably bust N7DR's exchange, even though N7DR did not send in a log: HL2ZN recorded N7DR's state as KY, even though N7DR probably sent CO (indeed, I did send CO).