I guess I'm in the minority, but I'd like to voice my support for Randy
K5ZD's suggestion to merge assisted and non-assisted.
My reasoning:
1. Assistance works in both directions: When you're running and someone
spots you, you're receiving the benefit of assistance even though you may
not be connected to a cluster yourself. Since the bulk of QSOs tend to come
from running rather than S&P, I suspect this is one of the main reasons why
unassisted scores are still higher than assisted.
2. You may want to compete against other unassisted stations, but you can't
know for sure whether they're not assisted or just saying they aren't.
3. The rules that make someone be "assisted" are fairly arbitrary and hard
or impossible to enforce. If I left my PC upstairs connected to a cluster,
but never referenced the data during the contest, am I assisted? What if I
accidentally left my logger connected to a cluster for the first few minutes
or hours of a contest, and glanced at but didn't seriously use the data?
What if I was connected to cluster, but only worked the contest for a few
hours and spent the entire time running? What if I'm connected to a local
Skimmer, but I'm only using the data to determine propagation? I have my own
opinion, but what if the Contest Committee investigates and disagrees?
4. It's one less thing the Contest Committee would need to investigate and
enforce.
If the consensus is to retain the differentiation of assisted vs.
non-assisted, then perhaps non-assisted stations should be required to
register beforehand, so that clusters won't forward spots for their calls
during the contest. Then they would be truly unassisted. Silly, right?
Exactly.
73, Rick ZL2HAM
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