Craig
Craig Miller, W8CR
Contest Like the Romans
The last thing I want to do is throw away a beautiful sunny day by sitting in the basement
doing some lame radio contest. Whoop-dee-do, doing the same thing over and over for
hours if not days. Repeatedly sending the fictitious signal report, “599”, no matter how
lousy the signal, followed by your name or state or county or a sequencing number.
You win money? No.
Gain prestige? No.
Meet beautiful women? Absolutely not.
BORING, what’s the point? Give me something challenging, worth my time and effort.
Reading the February issue of “Latin Today” magazine, I spied a notice announcing a ham
radio contest sponsored by the “Roman Dictator’s Radio Club”. The contest commemorates
the assassination of Julius Caesar some 2,065 years ago called the “Ides of March CW
Contest”.
As the name suggests, it’s held on March 15, every year. CW only and typically a regional
contest for those local to the seven hills of Rome, but DX is welcome too. Now this is a
contest that is worth the effort.
The rules (as best as I could translate from Latin):
-Contest is one day only from 12:01 AM-12:00PM Rome, Italy;
-All exchanges must be performed in Latin, no shorthand allowed (UR, ?, PSE, etc.)
-All references to numbers must be performed in Roman numerals, this includes callsigns
and signal reports: I4ERT=IIVERT. If your callsign contains a zero ‘0’, you must pause,
sending nothing, representing a null since zero is undefined in Roman numerals.
I0XYZ=I_XYZ.
-Exchange comprises of the actual RST, in Roman numerals (599=DXCIX, 469=CDLXIX) and
incrementing sequence number, also in Roman numerals, beginning with ‘I’. Any logs
repeating the same RST for all exchanges will be rejected.
-Scoring: 1 point for every QSO. Every 23rd qso (for every stab Caesar suffered) the points
are doubled. Once you reach 60 QSOs (the number of conspirators involved in the plot)
you’re entered in a drawing to win a CD “The XXV Greatest Lyre Hits”.
Popular contesting programs do not have this contest in their canned templates (I
understand AIO, All In One, will be ready for next year’s event) so you have to log manually
and submit your scores on papyrus.
I must admit, this was a challenge for sure and used an abacus to keep track of my score. I
had a wonderful time and racked up a score of MMMDCLXIX (3,669) which was good enough
to win!
Ad Victorium!