Stamps and Combos
Until now a completed contact scored 1 point. That was the simplest scoring system I could create. Since the beginning I thought that there should be interesting ways to earn additional points for a QSO. This last week I built out the scoring system. It’s based on stamps.
Stamps earn points
A stamp is one named fact about a completed contact, and it is worth points. A QSO’s score is the sum of the values of its stamps. There is no longer a point for simply completing a contact, no points for hosting, and no points for staying on the air a long time.
The stamps are minted the moment the host confirms with QSL, and the score is final from that moment. Four stamps exist today, each worth one point:
| Stamp | Earned when | Points |
|---|---|---|
| PTT | You were on RF for the contact | 1 |
| Foreign Lands | You and the other party were in different countries | 1 |
| Nessie | You worked the contact from a lake | 1 |
| Davy Jones | You worked the contact from the sea | 1 |
PTT, Nessie, and Davy Jones can be earned by each party on their own, so both of you can earn the same stamp on one contact. Foreign Lands belongs to the pair, because “different countries” is a relationship rather than a place.
Since rule #3 requires a host to reach the bot over RF, a host earns PTT on every scoring contact. Every QSO that scores at all still scores at least one point.
Combos name the good patterns
When the stamps on one QSO match a fun or rare pattern, the contact gets a combo: a name and a piece of artwork for the combination. A combo is worth no points of its own. It celebrates the stamps that are already there.
| Combo | The pattern |
|---|---|
| Two-Way | Both of you on RF, which is two PTT stamps |
| Nessie's Reunion | Both of you afloat on a lake |
| Full Fathom Five | Both of you at sea |
| Brackish | One of you on a lake, the other at sea |
Two-Way is worth 2 points because two PTT stamps are worth 2 points. Naming the pair changes no arithmetic. It is just more fun than saying “PTT” twice.
Where the water and the flags come from
The location stamps read the APRS position report you already send. The bot works out what country you are in and whether you are on a lake or at sea, and it names the water when the map names it, so a QSO can read “Nessie, Utah Lake” rather than just “a lake.”
I chose a custom subset of the Natural Earth 1:10m dataset to make these determinations, and had to accept some tradeoffs to make it work. As a result there are a few limitations:
- Close to a border, or beaconing a coarse position, the country can come out wrong.
- A boat in a slip may read as at sea, or as on the land.
- Anything that is not the land of a country or a lake inside a country is treated as at sea. There are no maritime zones in this model.
- In the Natural Earth data, rivers are (mostly) modeled as a line, so I couldn’t figure out a reliable way to tell whether someone was afloat on the river or just on the bank. This gets a little murky (ha!) in river deltas and estuaries, because at some point in your float down the river you will be considered at sea, and I can’t describe for you the rule that tells you when.
- Being at sea means you are in no country, so if one operator is at sea, the QSO cannot earn Foreign Lands.
Remember this is all just for fun.
OTA does its best to figure it out, and once the stamps are minted on your QSO, they are final.
What it looks like on the site
The stamps and their corresponding scores show up in several places on the website:
- A QSO page and the associated QSL card show the countries, lake names, or sea names of the parties, and the stamps minted for that contact. Combos and stamps each have a distinctive look.
- An op page carries a scoreboard at the top summarizing all the stamps and combos for contacts in that op. The logbook on that page shows each QSO’s score and the details of the stamps and combos for that QSO.
- There are new handbook pages with the details about scoring points and the available stamps and combos.
The database reset
QSOs in the database before today don’t have stamps, and won’t ever get them. After further testing with this new scoring system to make sure it works, I still plan to wipe the production database and start with a clean sheet.
Still to come: stamps for summits and (hopefully) parks, achievements, and leaderboards.
And I need to add a Zulu and local time clock display somewhere…
Lemme know how it works.
- Email: jared@k0tfu.org
- Discord: APRS OTA