AMATEUR RADIO CONTEST
 “ENIGMA AWARD ” REGULATION

 

DATES
The Enigma Award will start on Friday,  September 28^th  at 07.00 UTC, in conjunction with the EUROPEAN RESEARCHERS NIGHT,  and will end on Friday, October 5 th at 23:59 UTC .
The complete program is available online at www.enigma-reloaded.it  

PARTICIPATION 

All amateur radio stations in the world can participate, with the goal of collecting as many

QSO as possible with Activating Stations, following the rules explained in this document. 

The official list of Activatings Stations (List A) will be published on www.enigma-reloaded.it site by
September 25 th, 2018.  
The only participation Certificate categories are : OM category and SWL category, each having its own independent score ranking.
Activating Stations will not compete for the ranking, but will receive a special participation certificate.
As previously defined, each Activating Station requires the "pairing" with an original Enigma machine (not necessarily functioning).  

By the time of the registration application of the Activating Stations (List A), the name of the museum or cultural group hosting the machine associated with the radio  station will  be made known. 

For amateur collectors or private owners, the province where the station is located will be considered as sufficient information. Any additional detail, if any, will be welcome, but is not mandatory.
On October 6^th, the last  event’s day, the Activating’s Stations will call one by one the stations equipped with one emulated / virtual machine listed in  List B on the official website www.enigma-reloaded.it,  and will exchange encoded messages. 

 

QSO RULES  

QSOs are allowed on all HF bands 10-12-15-17-20-30-40-80-160 meters, in SSB, CW,  and all digital modes allowed.

QSOs via repeaters, transponders or other similar ways are NOT allowed and will NOT be accepted as valid.
The QSOs will be valid once exchanged the conventional RST report.
Each Activating Station can be contacted only once per day for each emission mode and for each band, throughout the whole contest.
Use of spots using Packet Cluster is allowed, but "self spotting" by the Activating Stations is NOT allowed. 

 

POINTS FOR QSO / HRD AND MULTIPLIERS 

Each QSO with Activating stations worth 1 point. The individual  callsigns of the Activating stations count as multipliers.
Example of scoring: 10 QSOs with "activating station 1", 25 QSOs with "activating station 2", 7 QSO with "activating station 3": Total points / QSO 42, multipliers 3,then 126 points in total. 

 

SCORES 

To obtain the certificate, OM and SWL participants must reach the following minimum score: 

Italian and other European stations: 16 x (n. of Activating Stations) points; 

DX stations: 8 x (n. of Activating Stations) points;  

 

SCORE  RANKING AND AWARDS 

Starting from November 5th, 2018, all amateur stations participating to the award and having put in log at least one QSO with at least one Activating Station will be able to verify their own QSOs and the reached award’s score, simply accessing to the website:
 http://arifidenza.hamlogs.net/
and inputing their callsign.
Once reached the minimum required score, a PDF copy of the award’s participation certificate will be automatically made available for free download. The access to the website is free, no specific access credential are required.

 

FINAL  REMARKS

Anything not specifically mentioned in this Regulation and its amendments, as well as any additional information  will be published on the official web site www.enigma-reloaded.it, to which as any request for additional information should be addressed.  
As general ruling system, the common practice, customs and conventions usually adopted within the amateur radio competitions hold.
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ENIGMA MACHINE SETTINGS

 

The purpose of this note is to define the mode of use of the Enigma machines on the final event’s day.
This note has been written  taking into account the most common  machine types hosted  in museums and owned by privates, as well as the emulators available on the net.
It is also considered the case of by hand coding and decoding of the messages, without using  any real or emulated cipher machine.
With only rare exceptions, most of the original machines owned by institutions or privates  belong to the types I, M3 and M4, which were designed and built to allow communication compatibility between the German Army and its supporting  groups.
These machines are typically equipped with 3 or 4 rotors, and are mutually compatible. 

Each station participating  to the Enigma final day will be host an amateur radio station and equipped with a real or emulated Enigma  machine. 

For the reasons explained in the following, it is recommended to operate with the availability of a computer having access to Internet. 

A simplified setting compared to the original procedure followed by the German Army will be adopted. 

The initial rotor positioning code (Grundstellung) will be the same  for all machines , as well as  the date of the Enigma Event : Fifth Edition 2018, namely 05 – 20 – 18 for numeric rotors, and E – T – R  in the case of alphabetic rotors (according to the date format in use in Italy, see photo 1). 

Photo  1

 

In the encoding procedure the rotors will be positioned in ascending numerical order from left to right, (for example : II, IV, V or I, III, IV, ....), see photo 2. 

The rotors will be previously pre set by acting on the “Ringstellung” ring, bringing the characters “01” or “A” of the alphanumeric ring  (depending on the machine type) to the position corresponding to the eagle’s symbol on the outer ring. 

Photo 2

 

After closing the door, rotate the rotor rings in such a way to read, from the  left to the right, the values ​​05,20,18,or   E - T- R  (photo 1, Grundstellung).
In machines equipped with four rotors, set the first rotor on the on “01” or “A”.
Do not  connect  any electric wire to the pins (Stecker), present only in military type machines.

COMPOSITION OF ENCODED MESSAGE

The letters obtained as a result of the encoding of a plaintext message will be transmitted in groups of letters in PARIS mode (also called "AGREED" = coded message consists of five - letter groups). 

ENCODING AND DECODING 

If the rotors on the receiving machine are identical to those of the transmitting one, the machine settings to be used in order to convert the encoded message into plain text is exactly the one described above.  

As already explained in this document, the messages originated by the transmitting stations will be encoded with the available rotors, whose number will be reported as plain text in each message, as well as the reflector (ETW) type : (A, B etc.). 

For decoding messages with a real Enigma machine, if the transmitter and receiver machines are not equipped with the same rotors, one among the many Enigma emulators available on the internet can be used. 

Useful technical information about the Enigma rotors details, as well as instructions about how  to manually decode the messages, even by means of  paper based simulators, will be  available on the Internet : for the latter, please refer to “Paper Enigma”.