A friend who asks to remain anonymous suggests the following -- one CW
Skimmer operator on each continent should dedicate his or her receiver
for the 24 hours of the Russian DX contest to monitoring one band, and
record as much of the entire bandwidth as possible. The band to be
monitored and the monitor's identity or location would not be disclosed
beforehand, but after the contest, monitors would contact the contest
organizers and make their files available for review. Since a
96-KHz-wide recording of one band uses about 2 GB of disk space per
hour, the resulting files will not be easily transferrable via the
Internet, but the Reverse Beacon Network's spot listings for the 24-hour
period would serve as an index of sorts, enabling the contest sponsors
to focus on a particular time period and request a specific review,
which the monitor could accomplish easily and with existing software.
Not every form of cheating can be caught this way, of course, but our
Russian friends have arguably the best applied mathematicians in the
world, so perhaps they will be able to develop other ways to use the
data. In the meantime, the mere fact of such random monitoring, and its
potential use by sponsors, may have much the same effect as unannounced
radar enforcement of speed limits has on drivers. If you don't know
when you might be caught, why take the risk?
--
73, Pete N4ZR
The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at www.conteststations.com
The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at
reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000
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