On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Tree wrote:
> The problem I see, is that having 3 very well equipped stations like the
> ones shown at this URL:
>
> http://www.eham.net/articles/7590
>
> who are primarily working only themselves robs the "real" contest of many
> opportunities to make the contest more fun. They are off in their own world
> exploiting their interpretation of the rules and the current scoring forumla
> to generate some numbers on a piece of paper (or web page). They are not
> contributing to the overall activity in the contest.
>
> The question is, do we want to discourage this type of activity?
>
> The same logic follows for captive rovers.
Ah, and therein lies the heart of the issue.
What do we care if rovers engage in circling _as_long_as_ they also
make reasonable efforts to contact stations outside their rover pack?
The real problem occurs when the circling pack is effectively operating
as a group of captive rovers in which they are captive to one another.
This "captive group rovering" is the type of activity which violates the
spirit of the contest, not the circling behavior itself. I suspect that
if appropriate rules were put in place to eliminate or reduce captive
rovering, it would eliminate most of the perceived problems with
rover circling.
In other words, all the arguments I've heard against rover circling seem
to be of the form of "They only work eachother, to the exclusion of others,
and that's not fair". This is essentially the same problem as captive
rovering, and both issues can likely be addressed by a single rule.
The rule may have to be carefully crafted so as to prevent easy
circumvention (e.g. three "family rovers" circling together could
likely circumvent a "no more than 25% of contacts with a single
station" rule with ease), but it seems doable.
As far as contributing to club scores: As long as typical rover scores
are at roughly the same level as typical fixed-station scores, I see no
reason to not include them in a club score. However if rover scores are
disproportionately larger than fixed-station scores, then the club
competition degenerates to one of creating as many rovers as possible,
and in that circumstance there may be a reason to institute a rover
club competition seperate from a fixed-station club competition. I
don't have the appropriate statistics to know if rover scores are
disproportionate to fixed-station scores, but once informed my opinion
would be steered by the logic stated above.
Thank you,
Brent Casavant
--
Brent Casavant http://www.angeltread.org/
KD5EMB -.- -.. ..... . -- -...
44 54'24"N 93 03'21"W 907FASL EN34lv
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