>
> Eric you said: ""Allowing single operator stations to have more fun in
> contests seems
> beneficial to our beloved sport. And encouraging part-time participants
> to operate more of the contest also seems beneficial.""
> Those were the same kind of excuses that were used in the early days of
> the
> DX Packet Cluster and look at that hornets nest now. Any outside system
> being utilized whether it be clusters or scoreboards or whatever will
> always
> provide an unfair advantage.
Long ago, and not so far away, when PacketCluster(tm) was in it's infancy
and the great discussion about single op use of it was raging in letters to
the editors around the world.... a great s/o coined the phrase to describe
the s/o using cluster as 'single op - distracted'. And so it has become.
Serious single ops 'do it on their own', and always will, and the ones who
do it properly will win, hands down.
Just take a look at the record, just a quick comparison of results from the
sept 2006 cq mag pages 103 and 110.
s/o s/o-a
k5zd/1 6.9M k1jb 1.9M
n2nt 5.1M w2re 3.2M
k3cr 5.2M w2up/3 6.1M
k4zw 4.4M k1pt/4 2.3M
n2ic/5 3.3M k5ya 3.1M
k6xx 1.4M K6rim .6M
n6cw/7 2.5M w7zr .6M
k8ir .6M w8mj .9M
w9re 3.9M n9ck 1.1M
k0eu 1.6M n0at 1.4M
in only 2 call areas out of 10 did a so-a beat the so... and then not by
much... and personally in at least one of those I think he would have beat
him unassisted anyway. Now are you going to tell me that any of those call
area winners were cheating and using packet?? How about the next 10 guys
down the list who lost the unassisted category but could have won the
assisted, if you were cheating and using the cluster why not claim it and be
the winner of the assisted class instead???
I repeat, and generalize... If a single op is looking for assistance outside
of their station to try to gain a tactical advantage, THEY ARE LOSING!
You really want to level the playing field? Make EVERYONE use the cluster
(require s/o's to log at least 1 qso from a cluster spot every 15 minutes),
make EVERYONE report their score every 5 minutes(and spend the next minute
analyzing the other scores during which they are not allowed to log a qso),
make EVERYONE follow cluster generated propagation predictions(you aren't
allowed to work anyone outside the 10db snr curve on the map), turn EVERYONE
into single-op DISTRACTED class and bring then all down to the same low
performance level. Good operators don't need the motivation, information,
or entertainment that spotting nets and scoreboards provide, they already
know it, and the results show it!
David Robbins K1TTT
e-mail: mailto:k1ttt@arrl.net
web: http://www.k1ttt.net
AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://dxc.k1ttt.net
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