PLEASE NOTE:

This contest is run seperately from the original VK/TransTasman contest. All logs should be sent to ZL3AKM at the address given in the rules.

This contest has been introduced to fill the gap left by the demise of the previous VK/Trans-Tasman CW contests. While there have been around 50 active stations each year in each of the CW contests, the lack of submitted logs, and the structure of the scoring system made the contest unviable. To address this, the new Trans-Tasman CW & Digital contest aims to boost activity and contact rates by: introducing digital modes to the contest, allowing stations to be contacted twice per hour (once on CW and once on digital), and actively encouraging the use of CW decoding software to boost CW activity.

Statistically, the relatively low number of active ZL stations results in wide fluctuations in the number of ZL stations from year to year. This leads to a wildly varying Participation Factor from year to year, ranging from 0.33 to 0.62, resulting in widely varying ZL scores while VK scores are dominated by local contacts with less statistical variation. Furthermore, when there are few ZL stations, not only is the PF low, but ZL's also make fewer ZL-ZL contacts, further reducing ZL scores... and visa versa when ZL participation is high. To combat this wildly random effect, and to simplify the scoring system, the participation factor has been replaced by a change to the scoring table. All ZL scores are now reduced by 6 points per VK contact. The adjustment will be made after the contest in 2009 so that SSB logging programs can be used without modification. The change is equivalent to a fixed participation factor of 0.4.

Have Fun!