Its pretty straightforward to define assisted. You either found and copied
all the information on your own or you didn't. If a machine or human
(directly or indirectly) has provided you a callsign - frequency couplet
that in many contests would allow you to "log it" solely on seeing the
screen and not turning up your volume, its assisted.
Whether the machine or human is sitting next to you or on the other side of
the globe, it doesn't change the above.
Lets stop the nonsense on the rest of it. A significant group want to enjoy
the "unassisted" experience defined above. Let us do it please. We want to
do it for more than 24 hours, with great antennas, and with more than one
radio. Whats so wrong with that?
No one is trying to take the assisted experience away from those who enjoy
that contesting. So stop attacking the group that does not find it equally
enjoyable.
There has been concerns brought up by contest sponsors that 1) the burden of
lots of categories is expensive and that 2) insuring rules compliance is
virtually impossible.
I believe 1) can be stifled by the interested communities taking over the
plaque and certificate disbursement from the sanctioned results. I
personally will volunteer to be part of that effort if it comes along with
assurance from the sponsors that the categories as we know them will remain.
The 2) item is a red herring when it comes to assisted vs non assisted.
POWER abuse is the number one issue in contesting..ask anyone in Europe as a
starting point.. and it is clearly very difficult to enforce. Assistance is
not perfectly enforceable but its pretty darned enforceable. Just listen to
one of K5ZD's contest recordings and realize that everything you hear is
also independently verifiable on air recording (which include what
frequencies people are on at the time) and ask yourself how you could
competitively fake not being assisted. How do you jump on calls all over
the place that you have never heard yet with your frequency hopping all over
the place? How do you jump on a mult without any tuning beforehand on radio
2 (which is required to be competitive in the category)? The answer is, you
would easily be shown to be a fraud (just like tracking sailboats in a trans
ocean race). So why is it that the "its unenforceable" argument comes up as
a reason to change the categories when this method exists yet for the bigger
problem of power.everyone is silent.
Lets deal with significant and reasonable concerns of the sponsors directly
- and help them so that indirect actions that hurt many innocent and
otherwise enthusiastic people aren't done out of frustration.
Count me in - but as assurances are given as to the reason - keep the
categories as they are in the major contests CQWW, CQ WPX, ARRL DX, IARU,
SS, ARRL 160/10. If WAE and Russian DX want to add the categories, that
would be great as well.
Ed N1UR
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|