Rating Rules

QsoLab's global rating measures relative success, not raw activity: it asks how many competitors you outperformed in each discipline, not how many QSOs you logged.

1. Disciplines

Two disciplines currently feed the rating: Marathons and FMT, the monthly Frequency Measurement Test run by FMTLab. More will be added over time — journeys and challenges are next -- each with its own weight and reference size, without changing the formulas below.

2. Percentile

Each discipline scores you by percentile: the share of participants you outperformed in that round.

Percentile = ((N - Rank + 1) / N) x 100

where N is the number of participants and Rank is your place (1 = first). Second of five scores ((5-2+1)/5)x100 = 80%; tenth of forty scores ((40-10+1)/40)x100 = 77.5%.

For marathons, one "round" is one closed week, not the whole season; for FMT, one round is one monthly test. Either way, your yearly percentile in that discipline combines your average round and your best round the same way: 70% your average percentile, 30% your best, plus a small bonus for how consistently you took part (up to +20%, and the combined percentile is always capped at 100%). A round nobody entered at all — an empty marathon week, a cancelled FMT test — is not a round you "missed": it is excluded entirely, not counted as a zero.

3. Weight and scale

Each discipline has a base weight — FMT 1.5, Marathons 1.0 — reflecting how demanding it is. That weight is then scaled by how many people actually took part in the rounds you competed in this year (averaged and rounded to the nearest whole participant), relative to a reference size (25 for FMT, 50 for Marathons):

Scale = sqrt(your_average_round_size / reference), clamped between 0.5 and 1.5

This keeps a young discipline's weight fair while its participant base is still small, without ever inflating a well-established one beyond 1.5x.

4. Diversity bonus

Being strong across several disciplines earns a bonus, on top of — never instead of — your score in each one. A discipline counts toward this bonus only if both are true: your percentile in it is at least 65%, and it had at least 10 participants. That second condition protects the bonus from small, easily-gamed rounds.

The bonus grows with the number of qualifying disciplines, but with smaller and smaller steps, approaching (never quite reaching) +7.50% as it grows, and it never shrinks when QsoLab adds new disciplines:

5. Points from one-off sources

Some points come from one-off sources rather than an ongoing discipline — for example event participation. These add directly to your rating after the diversity bonus is applied, and do not themselves count toward the diversity bonus.

6. The rating year

A rating year moves through two states you see: open, showing the most recently completed calculation pass and the date it ran — recalculation is triggered manually (from the admin, or by an FMT import), not on a fixed schedule, so what you see can lag behind what has actually happened until someone runs it again; and locked, once the year is closed and its results are final and no longer recalculated.

A marathon week counts toward the rating year it ends in, not the year its season started -- a season spanning New Year's publishes its December weeks in the earlier year and its January weeks in the next.

Every January, everyone's yearly rating restarts at zero.

7. Lifetime rating

Your lifetime rating blends every locked year you have into a normalised weighted average, decaying older years by 10% per year of age — measured from the most recently finalized year, not from today's date, so recalculating an old year later does not move anyone's lifetime rating just because time has passed.

8. Ties

Rating tables break ties by earlier registration (lower account id) and list positions ordinally — three tied participants are 1st, 2nd and 3rd, never three-way 1st.