You can't control who's spotting and who's manipulating it but really, who
cares. People who spend time spotting themselves and chasing spots (legally or
illegally from a rules standpoint) have never won a major contest anyway from
anything I can see. Rather than wasting alot of bandwidth disecting it, lets
just blow it open and say, you know what, don't make it a seperate category.
You know what else, lets make it fine to self spot as well. Seriously, the
data would suggest that you are handicapping yourself vs. non-assisted so why
are we caring.
Pretty soon the Summit will look like a digital band map and all the assisteds
will be chasing the self spots and basically going from internet pileup to
internet pileup. Me, I'll be finding them the old fashioned way and skipping
over many of those pile-ups and coming back to them when the mess calms down
(first call, low power, with wires, usually, its pretty funny actually).
So my vote. Reduce the categories to High Power, Low Power, QRP,
Multi-2/Single, Multi-Multi, Single Band, and Rookie. Kill the self spotting
restriction and may the best man, or woman, win. I bet the top 5 in each
category don't even change.
Just my 2 cents.
Ed N1UR
|