With the release of the Salmon Run results, I thought I would chat a bit about the event. We had a total of 304 logs from 6 countries and 37 states and provinces. There were over 34600 contacts represented in the logs sent in and not everyone sends in a log.
You’ll find the results at http://www.wwdxc.org/salmonrun/2018-salmon-run-results/ . The Salmon Run web pages really got a makeover and John W7CD was convinced we should move away from hardcopy PDF files for the results. I’ll admit I was leery of the idea but I am happy he twisted my arm. I can only think of one improvement, the ability to sub-sort the scores after sorting any of the other columns. Right now, John says our WordPress site’s tables don’t support that extra functionality that but he’ll research it. There is a work-around: just copy the results off the WA and nonWA Web pages and paste them into a single sheet on Excel. Then you can slice and dice the data anyway you want. Couldn’t do that before with the PDF version.
This was the first year of the Salmon Run Cabrillo Web page provided by Bruce WA7BNM. I noticed a distinct reduction in the number of hand logs I had to tweak. There were still a few that showed up in the mailbox that Jim K7WA had to convert. It is amazing that there are some people that still manage to provide non-standard logs even exporting from a popular logger but those are usually easy to manage. I don’t think I had a single log with Unix line endings this year. There were a number of logs that had time issues. Most were minor but the worst involved a MultiOp station using two computers. One computer wasn’t set to the correct time (or even year).
One person sent along pictures this year. I really enjoyed those. I had the chance to chat with a few of our participants. Most really enjoy the contest but propagation took a toll this year. I’ll try and publish the accumulated Soapbox comments in another article along with the pictures. It’s good to get positive feedback. If you’ve got some pictures from a mobile, expedition, multiOp or for other interesting reasons, I wouldn’t mind seeing them.
This was my first year a Chairman for this event and it kinda happened suddenly. Many thanks to the legacy crew Mike K7SR and Kirk NU7K that helped answer stupid questions along with Adam K7EDX. I leaned a lot on John W7CD, who doesn’t even contest. Matt KQ7W came through with the beautiful certificate that we’ll be sending out. Dennis K7DSE remains our go-to guy for smoked salmon. Mitch K7RL did a bang-up job, on short notice, as the bonus station W7DX. When you think about it, he gave out over 1 million points to the deserving (2153 Q’s * 500 points each). Hopefully, I didn’t miss you if you helped me out this run.
Ever the optimist, I’m looking towards next year and might float a couple ideas in the coming months. If you have any feedback, please pass it along. I am also looking for next year’s bonus station so if you feel you can do it, or want to grab a bunch of folks and do it together, drop me a note.
