The folks who argue for a separate category or for banning remote stations
make an assumption that should be examined more carefully: that remote
operation, like SO2R, is an advantage. It usually is not.
You must deal with many more issues than a single point station, and even if
you deal with them successfully, you still cannot do all the things you can
in a traditional station. Even over the best (and difficult to create,
impossible in some situations) low latency connections, timing your calls in
a pileup is more difficult, and there is less information available for
decision making.
Station design and maintenance takes more time and effort, there are more
things to go wrong, and many of the failure modes, even if recognized
immediately, take much longer to fix, resulting in more lost time or an
early end to the contest.
There also seems to be an emotional component in some of the opposition to
remote ops, also similar to the SO2R issue. "I have always done it SO1R, I
don't want to learn SO2R, so nobody else should be allowed to either" for
the SO2R issue becomes "I can set up a normal station, I have no need for
remote operation, so nobody lese should be allowed to do it either" for the
remote issue.
When Vic Clark set up several complete stations at the same place in the
1960's and this early SO2R configuration did well in contests, some people
accused him of running 10KW, because they did not understand what he was
doing and reacted emotionally to it. Likewise banning all remote stations
because someone might set up multiple receive sites on multiple continents
would be analogous to banning all multi-multi stations because some clubs
might run high power and inflate their QSO total. Most folks do remote
because it is the only way to operate, not because it is a way to cheat.
I CAN put up better antennas at the remote site than I can at home, and the
noise level is better. Maybe we should have a category for "attic dipole
QRP stations with a constant S7 local noise background" or better yet limit
everybody to that setup to make it fair. TIC.
73 John N5CQ
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