There are two kinds of people: Those who divide people into two groups and
those who don't.
There are contesters who remember Rubber Clocking and contesters who don't.
I am intimately familiar with Rubber Clocking. Not that I ever did it, because
I never operated a contest for the fully allowed time. Rather, because from
about late 1974 to early 1977 I, and one assistant (Bill Jennings, R.I.P.)
checked submitted ARRL contest logs by hand. This included doing dupe sheets on
the big logs by hand (on ARRL Operating Aid #6) and calculating the score on a
primitive solid state pocket calculator.
And -- ! -- it also included identifying Rubber Clockers, which really wasn't
all that hard. Some of those paper logs just smelled all the way from the Mail
Room
In the Paper Log Era, even I was smart enough to figure out that you write down
as little information as possible. One of the shortcuts was to log the time
every ten minutes, or so. So it was easy for the Rubber Clockers to ply their
evil, despicable trade. Heck, even among the privileged the timepiece of choice
was a Numecron clock. As hard as it may be for the young and unbaptised to
understand, we were not logged into the National Bureau of Standards 24/7. You
started operating when the bands exploded with signals and stopped when they
went dead. You took a break when you got tired and turned over a 30-minute egg
timer.
Now, for the Big Guns, I suggest the following: Edit your Cabrillo log and
massage the times to ensure you are just under the operating limit, or, as Tree
so aptly suggested in a slightly different context, get your time down to
23.59.99.999.999. (If you walk halfway to a wall, then halfway again, then
again, will you ever hit the wall?)
Then go organize your sock drawer. Then organize it again.
Jim Cain, K1TN/9
(P.S. to K6LL: You started this thread, and I got your point right away. If
you've been "doing it wrong" for 45 years, you are two years ahead of me. And
your post inspired me to look at my own CW SS LRC, which was fascinating. Those
half-dozen exchanges I supposedly miscopied were obviously transmitted wrong.)
(P.P.S. IRLP sucks but it was just a news story.)
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