Wave 2018 (formerly Scope Month)

[CNe7532294]

Thanks for this.  Its awesome!!!  That RF bundle would be just insanely good, but the bench kit woudl be wonderful as well.    I've just started working with RF projects doing Internet of thigns and cellular stuff.

Agreed. Like other posts at first, the decision to condense the time for the event (2 weeks) and the smaller prize pool was kind of a shock but there is some logic to it besides the nightmare of managing this event (finances, legal, logistics). Think of this.

The entire goal of this event is to invest in the future of the industry. I can also see why RF awareness is "call to action" in this year contest. I'm not sure if this is the case in Australia, Denmark, Great Britain or anywhere else in the world but here in the US there seems to be a shortage of RF and Microwave Engineers due to lack of awareness.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and their Occupation Outlook Handbook
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes172071.htm
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/telecommunications-equipment-installers-and-repairers-except-line-installers.htm#tab-8
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/broadcast-and-sound-engineering-technicians.htm
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/a-z-index.htm#R

I tried searching for anything Radio and Engineer and I just couldn't find anything but you find a lot of openings in any telecomms company (Bell for example). The world itself is in dire need of RF Engineers because it goes well beyond just broadcasting and telecommunications in the sources above. Nowadays we have WiFi and Bluetooth powering the internet and devices. Software Defined Radio is great but I believe it puts too much emphasis on coding and general electronics. Not that those are a bad thing, you will need those too, but there seems to be no spotlight on the RF design portion of how SDR works besides just theory.

I reckon that someone in the RF dept. made a strong case with this. In which case, good on them and thank you. Hopefully RF will be included next year as well. 

[Brumby]

I must say the packages on offer will provide a significant boost to the winners.

I'm looking at the RF package with hungry eyes - but I am torn between that and the bench bundle which will see far more service in my current endeavours.  However, I daresay I am quite unlikely to have to make that choice.

[MT]

To honored mr Bogdanoff!

There is a probable workaround for Keysight regarding some Scandinavian and other Eu countries exclusion, if Keysight register a gambling company in Malta and run the competition as a subsidiary from there the excluded countries can enter. This is how all the gambling companies round the State monopoly gambling rules.

Of course im not trying to suggest that Keysight do anything unlawful in Malta, oh no, no way, just saying legally bending mid eval constructed rules of contest excluded countries is what all multinational companies do all the time.... sort of...

[maginnovision]

I originally signed up using my phone but couldn't look at app notes collection so signed up using PC, couldn't find a way to just look at notes, and got another confirmation email for entering. In the unlikely chance I win, is this going to be looked at as gaming the system? I used same e-mail, phone number, address, name. Just checked my phone and it has the get daily entry but I already did it on my PC.

[wblackledg]

Thanks, I'll take the cheapo model.. 

[FrankE]

Hi Daniel!

Thanks for the latest ScopeMonth comp, sorry Wave 2018.

Can I ask why you don't use UT/GMT times for your competitions, etc (sorry to burst your bubble but the US is NOT the whole world ) as it would be simpler for non-US participants to know what time it is in their part of the world instead of trying to work out where your 'Mountain Standard' time zone is in relation to their own?

Cheers.

When I entered the times into my calendar for reminders I put them in as Mountain Time.
Ta-da! My calendar programmes list the entries in my calendar and alarms in local time, even sorting out the change to daylight savings time in Keysight's local time on March 11th (or 11th of March if you prefer).

The entry page gives reset time in UTC(zulu)

"Daily entry resets at 08:01:00 UTC"

[evb149]

I have a similar problem to what others are saying.  I tried to enter for today a few hours ago and I have no
confirmation email despite having requested one.  And let's say I'm pretty confident I didn't typo-error my email address and am not having the email get lost due to ISP / PC issues. 

As I recall today the web page itself said I am entered or if there was something amiss I didn't notice it.
So now I am wondering whether to trust my impression from the web site that it may be OK for today
or trust the email confirmation system (rather than the web server) is actually tied in to the confirmed entries "system" and so the lack of email is probably "authoritative" (assuming no user error entering the address or personal email error) and therefore I should try to reenter on the web page due to "negative confirmation by absence" that my entry was in fact NOT received today.

I did get confirmation email on previous daily allowed entries but as those were from work and this is from home
where my browser traffic is much more filtered by firewall / script / ad / etc. security software so I wonder if maybe it could be something that happened either as a bug in keysight's systems or some weird problem where I got entered as far as the web site thought but some invisible transaction with ??? back end keysight ad / database / whatever other server didn't work and that's why the entry may not have worked.

Now I don't know what to do.  I guess I will try restarting my browser, clearing cookies, and enter the same personal information again and see if it thinks I am entered or not by web / email and hope that doesn't mess up my entry if I did actually get one in despite negative confirmation.

I applaud the email confirmation feature (way better than nothing) though I suggest for the future  maybe reworking the web site to only display your web confirmation AFTER everything is 100% confirmed "front end and back end" that the entry is received / processed through all relevant keysight related systems / servers and then display back your entry time stamp and your provided details / email address and whether you should expect (by request) an email confirmation or something like that.

FWIW it seems like a common failure mode of e-commerce type sites.  In the past sometimes I will make some online purchase attempt and get some error message or failure to display any confirmation on the result page or by my immediate account order history as if it did not succeed, so I would re-order a few minutes later and yet the original order ended up "invisibly still in the system" and I would be double-billed / double ordered which fact would only show up to my account some hours or days later.  Other times you submit something like an purchase order or form entry and nothing ever happens despite apparent "success" indication from the web site.

I guess in this case I would HOPE that it is 100% safe with no appearance of duplicity to simply repeat an entry which wasn't successfully corfirmed by email with corresponding personal information and assume the system will only let it be made 1x/day.  Though it'd be disconcerting if it kept failing to confirm, then I'd wonder about my browser / fierwall / whatever even more... or the keysight servers being broken as others' noted email failures here
seem to suggest is happening recently.

I will add the my first entry in February I did get a confirmation email.  Yesterday's I did not get one.  Today when I went back it remembered me and I did not have to re-enter my information, just click a button and I did get a confirmation today.

I didn't get a confirmation yesterday either, glad it wasn't just me!  :)

I did not get a confirmation neither yesterday nor today. Not sure what is going on.

[Fred27]

I haven't got any confirmation emails. I don't think that's a problem. I didn't get any from the "Power up your Bench" contest either and then won a PSU.

[evb149]

That was actually highly confusing and disconcerting when it happened to me.
The "entry received" or "you got your entry" or whatever it exactly said was so terse and ambiguous I was left wondering if it indicated success of failure.
I can understand it might be made to look at browser cookies and just say "oh I have this person's form entry from the previous day so no need to make them enter it again", ok, fine, but in my opionion in such a case it should explicitly say:
"We recognize your details from the cookie we sent when you entered on 1-march, so now on 2-march we have entered you again since you selected to enter again today so you now have an entry for today."

Which, essentially, the confirmation email ultimately did confirm (at least the one I received, today's is missing).

The reason I had anxiety about a "you got your entry" type of ambiguous response is that I've seen too many sites where they have some bug where they get *the same exact entry* duplicated i.e. maybe it is confirming AGAIN TODAY  that I successfully entered YESTERDAY AGAIN based on yesterday's cookie or whatever as opposed to saying "yeah we got you yesterday, and now here you are today 3-mar, and we got you today also." which would be the expected but not unambiguous result.

Hence on online forums or e-commerce sites sometimes if you reload the page or whatever because the first server response didn't come back properly to your browser for whatever reason you get the exact same blog post made twice or get a duplicated purchase made for the same order or something as opposed to it being seen as a "new" (or at least not a duplicate of one already received) interaction as it should.

You got your daily entry!
- gotten by pressing the button on https://www.wavekeysight.com/landing/

Depends if you're entering on the same device and you still have the cookie. If not, then you're presented with the entry form again.

[Keysight DanielBogdanoff]

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

A couple comments:

1. We did weekend updates the first year and that was pretty rough for us as a small team, so we generally try to run the event just on weekdays. This includes the daily challenge question. It obviously does not include responding to forum questions

2. E-mail confirmations/entry confirmation: There were a couple ways to accidentally get multiple confirmation e-mails, but this doesn't show up as multiple entries in the system. The system we're using is pretty smart, so really the only way you could end up with multiple entries is if you are intentionally gaming the system with multiple sets of information. If you're unsure whether your entry went through, you can clear cookies and try again with the same e-mail. Also, if you see the "get daily entry" button, it means you can get an entry for that day. Going to the page from a device without the cookie and filling out the form again will yield the same result.

Also, the entry confirmation is a new thing for us this year, so there is certainly some streamlining we can do for future events.

[rsjsouza]

The daily entry button is a great and welcome added feature. Thanks for implementing this!

[_Wim_]

Belgium is included in the Wave 2018 - Test to Impress Contest.
You took feedback, and made multiple ways to get a price, basically allowing more countries to enter. Huge respect.

Where do you see Belgium is included? It seems we are not unfortunately. A shame beasue those are indeed really nice bundles!

I posted first in Dave post about Keysight wave, but removed my post there after I seen it was to enter to win a dumpster scope (which I do not really need), but would very much like to enter for a bundle 

Edit: ok, I see, we can enter the "test to impress"-contest, but not the lotery...

[evb149]

EDIT: I tried again today (new day) with the same PC / browser setup as the previous day and the final web page did confirm success in the expected way and I also today got the confirmation mail.  So I can only conclude that both the entry web site and the email confirmation weren't working (for me anyway) on the server side the day before.  The previous day's lack of entry / web / email confirmation didn't in retrospect appear to have anything to do with my browser / network / PC etc.
So I'm glad it is working now.

Thanks Daniel.

After not getting a confirmation email yesterday I did go back, clear cookies (actually used a completely clean firefox profile thus clearing cookies but also disabling my usual security / script / ad / etc. blockers) and try my same personal information from earier when I didn't get confirmation  again to see if I'd get a web based and/or email confirmation.
Looking more closely at the "try again after no confirmation" result yesterday was this:
* I still didn't get a confirmation email.
* I clicked submit on my form data with all the correct / same details which previously in the day didn't get me a confirmation email and that took me to a new page:
https://www.wavekeysight.com/landing/?kswHasEntered=1

* On that second page I saw MOST but not ALL of the familiar page layout, the wave 2018 logo, black background, quiz on the left, etc.

* But whad I did NOT see on that above landing page was any "Entry successful" or "You already got your entry for today" or similar message.  So there was neither an error message of any kind nor a success message of any kind for the entry, but everything else on the page looked similar to what I've seen previous days when I did get confirmation emails and I did get visual indication of "You got your entry" or whatever success message on the landing page. 

* On previous work-days I was at work entering on chrome browser with default settings.  And on the weekend yesterday as I said I was using Firefox 52.6 ESR on LINUX with a clean profile so no extensions or whatever when I tried to see if it'd work.

So now between the emails never working yesterday even after retrying with the same information and then at the second attempt when I checked more closely noticing that the after-submission "landing" page also didn't actually confirm (or deny) anything though I have seen it do so on previous days with a physically different workplace browser / PC I am wondering if there is some other kind of issue that is making the site not work for me here at home.  Browser?  Firewall?  Just a different page / style design for chrome vs. Firefox where you just never display the same success entries for FF?

But FWIW yesterday on my original attempt to enter which wasn't confirmed I did solve the quiz question and that worked as expected...

I can understand conceivable things that could cause such differences either on my PC/network side or on the web server / page side but that it isn't clear if there is a problem or if so what the nature of it is based on the site/browser interaction is a bit frustrating.

But again thank you overall for the contest, and I do think the confirmation email and remembered you from the day before changes are overall positive improvements though maybe some polish of the overall system could still facilitate things somehow in cases where things aren't apparently working for whatever reason.

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

A couple comments:

1. We did weekend updates the first year and that was pretty rough for us as a small team, so we generally try to run the event just on weekdays. This includes the daily challenge question. It obviously does not include responding to forum questions :)

2. E-mail confirmations/entry confirmation: There were a couple ways to accidentally get multiple confirmation e-mails, but this doesn't show up as multiple entries in the system. The system we're using is pretty smart, so really the only way you could end up with multiple entries is if you are intentionally gaming the system with multiple sets of information. If you're unsure whether your entry went through, you can clear cookies and try again with the same e-mail. Also, if you see the "get daily entry" button, it means you can get an entry for that day. Going to the page from a device without the cookie and filling out the form again will yield the same result.

Also, the entry confirmation is a new thing for us this year, so there is certainly some streamlining we can do for future events.

[Mr. Scram]

I've noticed you can enter with countries not listed in the eligible countries list. Does that mean those entries are trashed? Do you get informed when you try to enter with non eligible details?

[JackM]

Everything appears to be much more streamlined with many improvements compared to last year. Not to mention the huge prize packs, nice! 

I'll try not to get my hopes up because I know the chances are low, but I still catch myself dreaming about winning someday.

[alpher]

One way or another.

[Araho]

Read this line from Dave's video about the announcement: "The total approximate retail value of the prizes is a maximum of $536,682" 

[Mr. Scram]

Read this line from Dave's video about the announcement: "The total approximate retail value of the prizes is a maximum of $536,682" 

Retail value versus actual cost makes it interesting if you're the manufacturer

[MarvinTheMartian]

When I entered the times into my calendar for reminders I put them in as Mountain Time.
Ta-da! My calendar programmes list the entries in my calendar and alarms in local time, even sorting out the change to daylight savings time in Keysight's local time on March 11th (or 11th of March if you prefer).

Good tip! Thanks. 

[Keysight DanielBogdanoff]

I've noticed you can enter with countries not listed in the eligible countries list. Does that mean those entries are trashed? Do you get informed when you try to enter with non eligible details?

This was discussed a lot internally, and it was decided by the powers that be that the better experience for people is to not notify them if they sign up using a country that's not eligible. It does still give them access to the Wave library & challenge questions that they wouldn't get otherwise. Our goal is to make this an event that's interesting, educational, and fun regardless of the giveaways. We're also going to keep doing giveaways, of course .

[ali_asadzadeh]

I will cross my fingers

[Mr. Scram]

This was discussed a lot internally, and it was decided by the powers that be that the better experience for people is to not notify them if they sign up using a country that's not eligible. It does still give them access to the Wave library & challenge questions that they wouldn't get otherwise. Our goal is to make this an event that's interesting, educational, and fun regardless of the giveaways. We're also going to keep doing giveaways, of course .

I understand there is an interest on the Keysight side to harvest data of interested people, but not informing them that their actions are futile doesn't seem to be the way to go. I understand that's not your call, but it's a bit of a smoke and mirrors trick.

[Brumby]

This was discussed a lot internally, and it was decided by the powers that be that the better experience for people is to not notify them if they sign up using a country that's not eligible. It does still give them access to the Wave library & challenge questions that they wouldn't get otherwise. Our goal is to make this an event that's interesting, educational, and fun regardless of the giveaways. We're also going to keep doing giveaways, of course .

I understand there is an interest on the Keysight side to harvest data of interested people, but not informing them that their actions are futile doesn't seem to be the way to go. I understand that's not your call, but it's a bit of a smoke and mirrors trick.

I'm inclined to agree.  To hide the futility of their competition entry is dishonest.  Sorry.

I know it's going to take a little more coding for the entry page, but I would consider it much more ethical to advise them they aren't eligible - but by entering their information, they have access to the resources on offer.

[JPortici]

Just saw on farnell ITALY a banner for Wave 2018 that lands here https://www.wavekeysight.com/landing/?cmpid=PremiereFarnell

So we can partecipate?

[Mr. Scram]

Just saw on farnell ITALY a banner for Wave 2018 that lands here https://www.wavekeysight.com/landing/?cmpid=PremiereFarnell

So we can partecipate?

You can, but you don't have any chance to win anything. Italy isn't eligible for any of the contest variants.