Tuesday, September 22, 2020

CWOPs in the Texas QSO Party

 

The TQP is my favorite 'big' contest each year. While doing my usual CW-QRP thing this month, I kept noticing that during a lot of QSOs, a name would pop into my head though not part of the exchange: Sam, Van, Marv, Chuck, Hank, John (lots of those), Claude and so on. I realized that they were familiar from the CWTs that I enjoy on Wednesdays. There were so many that I became curious about how many CWOPs I was working.

At first I thought it would take a little programing to answer the question but, at least in Linux, it was actually pretty easy.

First I went to the CWOPs website, found the member roster and downloaded a spreadsheet file with all the member calls listed. From that spreadsheet I copied only the calls (well over 2000 currently) to a file: CWOPs_members.txt - one call per line

Then I used a similar process on my TQP log but removed the dupes (for example I worked VE3NNT on 2 bands) before copying that data to another file: TQP_2020_uniques.txt - again one call per line

I used the Linux command grep to look at leach line in the first file and check for a match in the second file with output to Matches.txt:

grep -oFf CWOPs_members.txt TQP_2020_uniques.txt > Matches.txt

If I had only wanted a count, I could have used:

grep -oFf CWOPs_members.txt TQP_2020_uniques.txt | wc -l

I found that slightly over 46% of the contacts I made in the TQP were with CWOPs members. More than I thought. Almost half.

My thanks to each and every one of them. 

 

cln – Nick
WB5BKL
'599 BURN'