I’ve been organizing the GOTA operation for my club’s Field Day for the past several years. Each year our goal is to max out our GOTA contribution, a goal that we’ve never met. Depending on your definition, we either did or did not this year. That uncertainty reflects the almost absurd complexity of the GOTA scoring system. While many rules require a main rule number, and a sub-point (like 4.1), GOTA is overboard silly with rules like 7.3.13.1.
Certainly by one standard we did max out. GOTA can make up to 500 QSOs. We did that before midnight on Saturday.
The confusion of GOTA mostly surrounds the bonus system. If operators make QSOs in sets of 20, then you get a 20 point bonus. And if a GOTA coach was present the entire time, then that 20 point bonus is doubled to 40 points. But wait, a single operator can make no more that 100 QSOs that count toward the GOTA bonus. If they go over 100, that’s OK, but there is no bonus beyond the 100+100 points.
Finally there is another bonus, typically associated with GOTA; a youthful bonus. If there are operators that are under 18, then each one is awarded 20 bonus points up to a maximum of 100.
So here is the break down in terms of maximums:
500 reported QSOs
500 maximum bonus if those are done in sets of 20 not exceeding 100 per operator
500 bonus if there is a GOTA Coach for the entire event
100 bonus points for up to 5 youthful operators
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1600 Maximum GOTA Points
But WAIT, those 500 reported QSOs get doubled for lower power (< 150 watts). So in our specific case the maximum point contribution for GOTA is 2100 points.
Our point contribution was 1940 points. Although we had eight operators, only 3 made a set of 100. One made a set of 40, and 4 others made a set of 20. So that was 420 out of 500. And of course those 80 missed bonus points doubled to 160 (GOTA Coach Bonus).
So did we or did we not max out? Most folks consider making 500 QSO “Maxed-Out”, we did that. But I don’t think we did because we left 160 points on the table.
Something left to shoot for next year!
