Over the years, valued contest skills have constantly been eliminated via
technology.
1. Sending good quality cw for the entire contest by hand - gone
2. Fashioning an appropriate and efficient dupe sheet per contest for your
part of the
globe - gone.
3. Having to put up with horrible QRM/splatter/intermod, esp on the low bands
- almost gone
4. Knowing where to turn your beam "in your head" - not needed
5. Knowing where the gray line is (linked with #4) - gone
6. Knowing what constitutes a valid (good) callsign by country - gone (SCP)
7. Having a box full of sharp pencils...having an electric pencil
sharpener...mechanical
pencils - gone (keyboards/computer logging)
8. Making up enough log sheets before the start of the contest - gone
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...
So what is left? Not much...tuning the band, copying callsigns, correctly
entering those
calls into your logging software. Just three things.
So now you want to say that it is okay to NOT copy the callsign yourself and to
NOT find the
DX yourself. And, of course, point-shoot results in the callsign going into
the log too.
So what would then constitute "contest skill?" Skill in buying stuff? Skill
in hooking it all up?
With respect to Skimmer being = use of Keyer, etc.
If your rig has great Xtal filters, DSP, a keyer, even a pan-adapter, in all
cases the HUMAN is
driving those function. The keyer doesn't "know" when to send and and it
doesn't
prompt you...you have to prompt it. The DSP can't optimize itself to your
ears...YOU do that.
The pan-adapter doesn't tell you WHERE the band is open to nor what the
callsigns are...YOU
have to do that. A CW decoder only decodes what it "hears" on the frequency
YOU have
tuned to and nobody is going to excel at contesting (big score) if that is what
you need to
copy callsigns.
With Skimmer...it is driving YOU. It tells YOU what the calls are, on what
exact frequency,
and hence where the band is open to. You react to IT...the same as YOU would
react
to DX Alerting Assistance.
And that's it. I draw no further conclusions....
de Doug KR2Q
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