I'm always curious when the suggestion to de-invent packet spotting is made.
By what mechanism? By what grace of deity would kolumbus.com give two hoots
about our desire to return to the purist's view of what is radio? (I'm not
arguing that view, in fact I applaud it, what I do challenge, however, is
the notion that it should be imposed upon others.)
Ban it from contests? Seems to me that carries two problems: 1. Only
cheaters would have packet (one doesn't need to identify oneself to watch
spots.) 2. It seems a bit selfish for the contesting community to decide to
solve its inability to police itself by disrupting the pleasure of
non-contesters who wish to continue to use packet.
Of course they can still use packet, but with greatly reduced numbers of
spots. Part of the attraction for casual ops, particularly in contests like
DX or WW, is to bag more countries, often by chasing spots. If W3LPL isn't
spotting anymore, there goes half the world's spots!
You'll also be chasing away a large number of logs, since many packet-using
casuals who now submit a log wouldn't in the future since it no longer obeys
the rules.
How much fun would contests be if there were only puritan contesters on the
bands? I'd guess not much. My guess is that major ops like OH0any burn
through the regulars by midday Saturday. Would make for a pretty boring
contest if there were no casuals to fill up the pileups after that, no?
You can't take packet away any more than you can put the atom back together.
What you can do is what David is doing, and that's providing a forum to
analyse potential cheats and thereby discourage cheating.
Interesting that the clusters have stopped providing IP data... Hmmm. Any
conspiracy theorists out there?
Une chasseur sans proie depart avec les mains vides.
73, kelly
ve4xt
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