Unfortunately, CQWW has no monopoly on badly written rules. How about this
excerpt from the ARRL General Rules:
"3.3.An operator may not use more than one call sign from any given location
during the contest period.
3.4.The same station may be worked only once per band for contest credit.
3.5.A transmitter used to contact one or more stations may not be subsequently
used under any other call during the contest period, except for family stations
where more than one call has been issued, and then only if the second call sign
is used by a different operator. (The intent of this rule is to accommodate
family members who must share a rig and to prohibit manufactured or artificial
contacts.)"
Lest anyone think this is an academic exercise, in the current NCJ the NCCC
explained how it took back the Sweepstakes gavel by exploiting Rule 3.5. To
quote: "...one key part of Rusty's plan was to create a team of contesters ...
who would give up their hopes for individual glory and split their operation
between two locations using two calls ... I used K6RB at my home station, using
one of my two FT-1000 transceivers. Then at 6 AM I drove 25 miles to K6XX's
house, bringing an FT-990 transceiver with me and plugging it into his unused
amp and antenna system. There I used the call NZ6K -- a club call for the Surf
City Contest Club. At the same time Bob, K6XX drove 25 miles to my home
station with an unused FT-1000MP...and operated with club call N6IP...Compared
with the scores we each generated in previous years using one call for 24
hours, our total scores were about 25 to 30 percent higher."
Clever, right? Because rule 3.5 uses the word "transmitter" rather than
station, a flock of prearranged swaps like this can have a large effect on a
club score. Would NCCC have won the gavel without this? I don't know. I do
think that the strategy violated the stated intent of rule 3.5, which I suspect
was written long ago, before the day of transceivers and SO2R.
By the same logic NCCC used, what would be wrong with turning every SO2R
station in a club into two "stations", each op using a different callsign and a
different "transmitter." It's OK by the letter of the rule, right? Or how
about reconfiguring a multi-multi so that it could have 6 different callsigns
and rack up 6 separate scores, so long as each operator used a separate
"transmitter."
Badly written rules like this invite loophole exploitation and jailhouse
lawyering. For example, what constitutes a "station" in the meaning of rule
3.4? You could argue that in a case where only the callsign and the
transceiver are different (perhaps even the same make and model), but the
location, amplifier and antenna system are the same, the "station" is the same,
regardless of the callsign. If that argument is accepted, then all the QSOs
made after an NCCC-style swap, with the same stations worked from that
"station" before the swap, would be invalidated under rule 3.4, as would any
such QSOs from my hypothetical split SO2Rs or multi-multis.
I think ARRL needs to look hard at its rules, decide what it wants, and then
rewrite the rules to suit, or at least issue an official interpretation (as CQ
did with the CQWW Multi-Single). I think it would be a shame to invalidate
individual efforts like K8MR's, where he jumps from station to station
operating SS under that station's call. Maybe the proper argument is that we
want to encourage "activity", and that the net result of NCC's ploy was to put
more stations on the air amassing more total QSOs for everyone. Or maybe we
don't want to encourage the proliferation of this sort of maneuvering.
Let the discussion begin.
73, Pete N4ZR
The World HF Contest Station Database
was updated on 18 August 2005
2988 contest stations at
www.pvrc.org/WCSD/WCSDsearch.htm
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