OK in the past I have complained about this too. This year though, I think I'll be in the top 10 for SOAB(A) LP, other contests I go into non-assisted, which qualifies me as a "competent" little gun
Rather than dwell on the dark side, why not look at the bright side? I personally feel the situation is far better than just a couple years ago. I heard most of the big guns contesting in excellently
Actually taking full advantage of skimmer or RBN or manually-posted spots is something that I think very very few have mastered. Up until the past year or two, the "assisted" category of most contest
In decades (centuries?) past, the ARRL DXCC desk used to tell folks that that they prefered paper cards as confirmation for awards, but that they would also go check the DX station paper logs submit
NAQP is supposed to be the "Gateway Drug" to bring new little gun contesters into the fold, educate them on the basics, get WAS in a day, and give them the thrill of being able to run a frequency. It
I operate some contests with reversebeacon assistance and others non-assisted. Mostly... if I have a chance of picking up new DXCC credit I will enter assisted. What this means is that I enter very
I leave it up to the organizers to figure out how many categories and subcategories they want to keep track of. If they want to lump assisted and non-assisted together, fine. If they want to lump ass
I was watching the complaints on a different mailing list about the huge advantage the East Coast supposedly had in the ARRL 160, and went and actually looked at the top 20 LP stations, and almost al
I jumped into the deep end of CQ WPX this past weekend in fact not even reading the rules before I started (I know, silly of me.) I used "assistance" in the form of both reversebeacon skimmer spots a
"Faking" exotic calls on the air to be picked up by skimmers and draw folks away from the real DX has been in play for several years. I hope culprits can be rung up by the SDR's that I'm sure were re
A quick look-see shows that K0ZR was running on the above frequencies at the above times. I was overall very impressed with the reversebeacon/skimmer accuracy this weekend. My LCR will be very intere
Oh, I disagree entirely. When either a person or the skimmer spots a busted call, it is amplified by other humans who click on it, work it, and re-spot it with the same busted call. I don't think sk
As to whether contest organizers go out and track down E-mail addresses for those that neglected to send in their logs: In fact, they do. There are several contests I have participated in (for fun!)
I dabble in many contests. Sometimes the dabbling turns into several hundred Q's. Several times I've not sent in a log, and after the deadline I got an E-mail from the organizers asking "we noticed
Is that "forced" really true? Let's arbitrarily say that "competitive" is "in the top 5 of a category". Let's arbitrarily take the CQ WW CW 2011 final scores and zoom in on US LP, and compare top fi
Strangely enough, my WPX SSB score is in the http://www.3830scores.com/ summary but not at pileup.ru. That means I check them both :-) I had thought that pileup.ru was scraping the 3830 posts so I'm
I love it when contest organizers help recognize the part-time participants with certificates etc. In particular if a certificate comes in the mail in the week or two before the next running of the c
I want to thank all the log-checkers at ARRL and CQ and other contest sponsors who prepare and publish LCR's. The sweepstakes exchange, and everyone's willingness to give a fill, helps improve our lo
It's more than just a prefix test or dx contest. WPX has a number of rule quirks that make it interesting. I don't think there's anything that has to be "fair" or "level playing field". I'll come bac
I'm not so sure there is an issue. Every contest is a mix of "work for points" vs "work for mults" and there is always a trade-off to maximize score. Another contest where it is more productive to w