Especially some WRTC aspirants were among the first to break the 1000 QSO mark, some ops already early Sunday like CR6K, UA2F or IS0/OM2VL,LZ8E. Some more like LY4L, SK3W or HA9T are to be expected is this range, too, to mention only some. This year again more stations joined the fun with livescores posting their actual score online. But of course the 130 stations having logged in are only part of the game. We will present raw scores (unchecked) of all participants in early November, few days after deadline for log submission.

Usual disclaimer about our most mysterious multiplier: The letters in the DOKs stand for DARC districts (and Z for club VFDB), but there is no district J in DARC. Only by working clubstations which have special DOKs starting with J (mostly from youth departments, because J stands for "Jugend"=youth) you can bag the rare J multiplier.

Participation was a bit down from the record year 2016 but did not suffer in longrange comparison: On Sunday before deadline the number of submitted logs crossed the mark of 2000, something we had experiend before only in 2015. And another positive: Log quality is up - we hade comparatively fewer cases of logs needing serious repair :-)  But of course individual times and the like kept us busy.
We will keep you up to date with whats happening now as long as we collect logs and later start the logcheck after the deadline. For now: Many thanks and finally some first impressions sent by our participants on the many different online channels.

Slices of time slots: Next step then was to zoom in from total average to averages for shorter time slots to adapt i.e. for varying condx during the contest. With most RBN setups we have only one spot every ten minutes per each skimmer. Used were averages from five skimmers for each time slot. They showed mostly a span of 4 to 6 dB between highest and lowest value of the time slots for a given station. This may be attributed to either varying condx or different noise situation on each of the several frequencies.

One can also group the slices of several stations calculated in chronological order to compare them at comparable times. It looks such with the right table being sorted by call:

Beams: Most of the work was done on 80m and then 40m with German and EU stations. It should minimize the influence of skip zones where few kilometers difference can mean an abrupt loss of signal strength at the target region, and it should also minimize the influence of beam directions.
We checked that with two EU stations in more than 1000km distance whose beam directions to Germany differed about 90 degrees and calculated their average S/N values at some European RBN skimmers on 15 and 20m "behind" Germany. With four of five choosen skimmers we earned a nearly exact difference of 13dB between the two stations when one had the skimmer in the main lobe and the other station had the skimmer about 90 degrees off. But as it is still with RBN analyzes: The fifth skimmer gave an opposite result favoring the sidelobe value over the near main lobe value.

Short summary: There is insight, value and potential in RBN figures. But they will require a lot of work still to be done if we want to use them as a serious “forensic” tool on which hard measures like DQs could be based – if it comes to single digit dB figures.
One task is to evaluate the quality of spots delivered by RBN skimmers which may result in choosing only a selected numer of somewhat “certified quality skimmers”. Next is sober statistical work to eliminate clearly erratic values. Then we need some on air validations with different power levels and the respective RBN response. The same is necessary for comparing different antennas at the same QTH at constant power level.
We also do need more spots than only from 10 minute intervals to improve the sampling rate.
Thus ending this summary with thanks to DL1RTL and DL6MHW for tests plus thoughts and input.

Of course we could also try to gain real signal strength values from SDRs.

The big “but”: Do we really want to do this? Power cheating is the equivalent to doping in sports. Once our analytic tools are at or near a level to be used for adjucating we will experience the same as sports have experienced: A shower of most creative antenna and condx theories and generalized anecdotes will pour down. All those “I once worked the antipodes with five watts, so you can not rule out that...” or “The ground properties at my house are soooo much different...” will be experienced like all the creative metabolism theories and stories about ominous steaks with hormones eaten in an odd tavern on the roadside which all have been heard in professional sports.

(de DL8MBS)