Contest Club Finland to Provide Running WRTC-06 "Scoreboard"

Martti Laine, OH2BH

NEWINGTON, CT, Jul 5, 2006--During World Radiosport Team Championship 2006 (WRTC-06) from Brazil, Contest Club Finland (CCF) will provide running team scores to the worldwide Amateur Radio community via an Internet "Scoreboard." Held in conjunction with the IARU HF World Championship, WRTC-06 gets under way at 1200 UTC on Saturday, July 8, and concludes 24 hours later. Official scores are expected to be available July 10.

"Just take your popcorn and soda, and your weekend fun will be guaranteed," quipped CCF member and well-known DXer Martti Laine, OH2BH. "Each of the 48 competing teams will release their scores at hourly intervals, and the ranking will appear on your computer screen along with historical data." The competing teams will not see the hourly updates.

A CCF team under the leadership of Risto Lund, OH3UU, is in Brazil to manage the system. Veijo Kontas, OH6KN, will oversee the project and handle training.

Here's how it will work: Referees at each WRTC-06 station will text-message the hourly scores via cell phones made available by Nokia to a dedicated server on a laptop at the scoring center in Brazil. From there, the data will undergo processing before being transferred to another SQL server in California. Laine said the system has been in trial use for a few days now.

Laine says the Scoreboard has two parts separated by a narrow, gray vertical line. On the left-hand side are the latest standings from top to bottom -- including a so-called "minus percentage," which represents by how many percent each competitor's score falls short of the top station at that point in the event. The right-hand side features statistical details. These include the standing of each competitor station on an hour-by-hour basis and the relative gap between the stations.

"That gap can be used for drawing conclusions about the trend -- whether it has narrowed or widened in relation to the leading competitor as a function of time," Laine explains. All scores sent by referees are compiled and forwarded to the database hourly at five minutes past the hour, with an updated Scoreboard page ready a couple of minutes later. Browsers with Java are updated automatically at eight minutes past the hour.

Laine cautions that while the Scoreboard works with all browsers -- including Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox -- the graphics may not necessarily come out satisfactorily for those using browsers other than IE.

"The Amateur Radio community is greatly indebted to these people and specifically to the companies that offer support to make this technology available for WRTC 2006," he said.

Contact Laine for additional details on the WRTC-06 Scoreboard.

For additional WRTC-06 insights, National Contest Journal (NCJ) is posting blogs that include the musings and general comments of WRTC-2006 competitors, referees and log checkers. NCJ readers may post their comments as well.

Access the blogs from the NCJ home page or from the WRTC-2006 coverage section. Postings have already begun and will continue until WRTC-2006 wraps up.

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