Club Competition Rules and Contest Disqualification Criteria The 1996 contest season is upon us. Five of the ARRL-sponsored contests during 1996 include an ARRL affiliated club competition: January VHF Sweepstakes, February/March International DX Contest, November Sweepstakes, December 160-Meter Contest, and December 10-Meter Contest. There are a few ground rules to follow to ensure that your club's scores are properly credited (and to ease the log checker's burden). These are detailed below. From time to time it becomes necessary to consider disqualifying an entry to an ARRL contest. The particulars are listed below. Most of the time the reason is simply that the person submitting the entry was not accurate in copying call signs or contest exchanges. As long as you are careful only to log QSOs when you are sure of the information, you should have nothing to worry about. [The use of standard ARRL contest forms, computer disk, and electronic entries will help ensure that your score is figured properly and speed up the publication of contest results in QST.] Don't hesitate to call or write if you have a question about the rules listed here or the rules for any particular contest. The time to ask is before the contest, not afterward. Club Competition Only ARRL active affiliated clubs may participate in the club competition. A member must be listed in the regular score listings to be counted for a club. For a club to be listed, two conditions must be met: 1) At least three different entries from members of the club must be submitted. 2) All members wishing to be included in the club score must indicate the club name on their summary sheet and the club secretary must send a list of all club members eligible to compete for the club and which level (unlimited, medium, local) they wish to enter for each competition. Remember to meet the mailing deadline! There are three levels of club competition: 1) Unlimited: Any club submitting 51 or more entries. (One station can submit two entries--one on CW and one on phone in the November Sweepstakes and the DX Contest.) All stations and all operators must reside within 175 miles of the club's center. All members must attend at least 2 club meetings per year to be eligible to submit an entry. If, however, they have not been a member for a year's time, they must have attended a meeting as a member prior to the contest. Those club members who are disabled in such a way that they are unable to travel are exempt from the two meetings per year rule but they must be regularly active in club affairs. To be considered bona fide, a member must be active in club affairs. Members living outside of 175 miles and/or members operating stations outside 175 miles may not compete in the club competition. The club must be ARRL active affiliated. 2) Medium: Any club submitting 50 or fewer entries except as noted in local club criteria below. The same mileage and attendance requirements apply as the unlimited class club. The club must be ARRL active affiliated. 3) Local: Any club submitting 10 or fewer entries. All members must reside and operate within 20 miles of the club's center. There is no attendance requirement. Again, the club must be ARRL active affiliated. Single-operator and multioperator station scores may be counted. At a guest-operated single-operator station, both the guest operator and the station licensee must be members of the same club in order to count the score for that club. At multioperator stations, at least 66 percent of the operators must be members of the same club for the score to count for that club. A multioperator entry may (optional) utilize non-member operators licensed one year or less without including such operators in the above 66 percent calculation. The intent here is to encourage clubs to recruit contesters from newer amateurs without adversely affecting the club aggregate score. In conjunction with the two meetings per year rule, the club must hold at least four in-person meetings per year. A club's entry classification may be changed if, in the opinion of the ARRL Awards Committee, the club has manipulated its number of entries to fall into a lower classification (eg, if a club with 100 members submits only the 10 highest scores, even if more than 10 of its members wish to compete.) It is not within the intent of these rules that a club should vote out a member or that a member resign and then be voted back into the club later so the member-attendance rule can be met. The highest scoring active affiliated club entry will be awarded a gavel in each category (unlimited, medium, local). The highest single-operator CW score and the highest single-operator phone score (ARRL International DX Contest, ARRL November Sweepstakes, and ARRL 10-Meter Contest) in any active affiliated club entry will be awarded with a club certificate when at least three single- operator CW and/or three single-operator phone scores are submitted. Disqualification If the claimed score of a participant is reduced by two percent or more, the entry may be disqualified. Score reduction does not include correction of arithmetic errors. Score reduction may be made for taking credit for unconfirmed QSOs and/or multipliers, duplicate contacts and/or other scoring discrepancies. An entry with more than two-percent duplicate contacts left in the log or an entry in which more than two-percent "rubber clocking" (altering the actual time to increase the operating time so that it is greater than the allowable limit) is detected will be automatically disqualified. If a participant is disqualified, he or she will be barred from submitting an entry in the next annual running of that specific contest, eg, disqualification from the 1996 phone SS prohibits submission of an entry for the 1997 phone SS, but 1997 CW SS participation is okay. The calls of all disqualified participants will be listed in the QST contest report. Any participant on the borderline of disqualification, but not actually disqualified, may receive a warning letter. For each duplicate contact or miscopied call sign that is removed from the log by HQ, three additional contacts will be deleted as a penalty. The penalty will not be considered part of the two-percent disqualification criteria. In all cases of question, the decisions of the ARRL Awards Committee are final. *eof