RULES OF THE POLISH-WIDE AMATEUR RADIO EVENT
WITH THE USE OF STRAIGHT KEYS
"Straight Key Contest"
1. Aim of the contest:
The contest is organised for lovers of the use of straight keys. We would like them, by participating in this contest, to have an opportunity to show their operator skills and to have a great time together with younger amateur radio friends. We also invite cordially younger fully licenced amateurs, for whom this contest
may be interesting and different from other ones.
2. Organiser of the contest:
- Regional Department of the Polish Amateur Radio Union in Łódź (ŁOT PZK OT-15).
3. Media patronage:
- Editorial Board of the „World of the Radio” („Świat Radio”) Monthly Magazine.
4. Date of the contest:
- The second Friday of September is considered as the date of the contest, from 17.00 to 19.00 UTC.
5-minutes QRT is obligatory before and after the contest.
5. Bands and modes:
The 80 m band (only the CW mode and only operation with the use of any straight key) in accordance
with the BAND-PLAN (3.520 - 3.560 MHz).
6. CQ-call in the contest: "CQ TEST SP"
7. Participants:
The participants are considered to be fully licenced individual and club amateur radio stations, both
Polish and foreign ones, whose operators:
- operate on the CW mode – using any straight key,
- do not exceed 100 W of the output power put to the antenna,
- do transmit only one signal at a time.
It is not allowed to use more than one OWN call sign, even when an individual or a club station posesses valid licences for the primary and a special event call sign.
8. Reports and control groups:
- the individual participants of the contest exchange control groups composed of the RST report and the age of the operator,
- the women submit the RST report and the letters YL,
- the club stations submit the RST report and the number of years from the issue of the license for a given club.
Duplicates – i.e. repeated contacts are not scored, but they must be left in the log.
It is not allowed to change the location of the station during the contest.
The contacts must be logged in the UTC time standard.
Be careful and do not confuse the number 0 (zero) with the letter O (capital O) in the control groups.
9. Scoring in the contest:
- The number of points for a contact corresponds to the age submitted by the correspondent, e.g. for a contact with the operator at the age of fifty – you are scored 50 points, for a QSO with a club station submitting e.g. 59 34 – you are scored 34 points.for a QSO with a women submitting e.g. 599 YL - you are scored 88 points.
- The multipliers: the prefixes of the stations with which the contacts were made - e.g. SQ2, SP7, OK2, LY3 etc. – as in the CQ WW WPX Contest. Any prefix is counted as a multiplier only once, no matter how many contacts with the stations with a particular prefix were made. Your own prefix is automatically counted as a multiplier.
Attention!
The use of electronic keys or transmission by means of computers is not permitted.
The stations of the Contest Committee members will not be classified.
The result is: the sum of the points obtained for the QSOs x the number of the collected prefixes. In case of obtaining the same number of points scored by two or more stations – a higher place is awarded to the station whose number of contacts with errors is smaller. In the next step, the date of submission of the log will be taken into account (the day, the exact time).
10. Classification:
- A – SP QRP stations (up to 5 W out),
- C – QRP Foreign Stations (up to 5W out),
- D – Foreign Stations OPEN,
- CHECKLOG – the log only for control (the log is unclassified).
Any participant of the contest can be classified only in one category.
11. Contacts are not accepted as valid in case of:
- establishing of a contact before and after the duration of the contest (QRT),
- duplication of a contact (DUPE),
- the call sign of a correspondent received incorrectly (CALL),
- the control group of a correspondent received incorrectly or with errors (RPRT),
- difference of the time in the logs of correspondents exceeding 5 minutes,
- missing log of a correspondent,
- discrepancies referring to the band and the mode.
12. Awards:
- awards – for taking from the 1st to the 3rd places in the particular groups,
- electronic Certificates of Participation (in the PDF format) will be issued and available to be downloaded individually for all participants of the contest who did send their logs in due time.
13. Submission of the logs:
All logs from the contest in electronic form as a *.cbr (Cabrillo 2.0) file are to be submitted to the organiser of the contest within 7 days after the end of the contest to the following e-mail address: zawody.cw@gmail.com
The name of the Cabrillo file must be composed only of the call sign of the station taking part in the contest.
It is allowed to post logs in paper form to the following address:
OT PZK Łódź, skr. poczt. 442, 90-950 Łódź 1, Poland
The logs submitted in paper form will be transferred manually by the organiser into a Cabrillo file and processed.
The contest will be fully processed 30 days after the deadline for the submission of logs.
After this time, the final results will be announced.
14. Complaints
Any potential complaints may only refer to discrepancies in the calculation of points (they cannot relate to the errors of operators included in the submitted logs), and are collected at: zawody.cw@gmail.com within 7 days since the publication of the preliminary results. After this period, the announced results of the contest are considered to be official and they are not subject to appeal.
The decisions of the Contest Committee are final.
The Contest Committee is composed of the following Members:
Chairman: Piotr SP7SZK
Committee Member: Radek SP7WRC
Committee Member: Zbyszek SP7MTU
