> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Neiger [mailto:n6tj@sbcglobal.net]
> Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 20:23
> To: David Robbins K1TTT; CQ-Contest@contesting.com
> Subject: SCOURGES CONTINUED
>
>
> While these may appear, superficially, to be admirable goals, are not
we
> maybe overlooking the fact that these individualistic goals can be
deemed
> to
> be VERY SELFISH when considered within the overall context of ham
radio,
> operating skills, and whatever legacy we leave for the next generation
of
> operators (assuming that there IS a next generation, of course)?
>
But bad operating skills have been around longer than packet spots. I
remember before packet hearing people calling in pileups then after they
work the guy asking 'whats your call?'... and dupes have been around
long before packet also, and often are not caused by packet, but by
other problems like miscopying the station's call yourself... I remember
being in a pileup recently for a station I didn't have very good
propagation to and hearing another station who did have good prop dupe
him within minutes because they changed ops and the new op thought it
was something rare! Then of course there are problems with sloppy cw or
bad phonetics.
If you ever come operate at my m/m one thing I always teach new
operators is that they have to copy the dx station's call, never to
trust the packet spot. Anyone who uses the spotting network regularly
in contests knows that, it is the casual ops who get fooled most often.
And of course classifying the development and maintenance of the
spotting network as selfish is very short sighted. Many, many hours of
work go into setting up and maintaining the network, helping new users,
fixing problems, and all sorts of other stuff. If it wasn't a useful
tool for many operators out there would not be the number of users and
nodes that we now have, and there are more coming every day. And of
course virtually all sysops who put their nodes up for contesting also
leave them on 24/7 for use by dx'ers and others, hardly a selfish act.
David Robbins K1TTT
e-mail: mailto:k1ttt@arrl.net
web: http://www.k1ttt.net
AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://dxc.k1ttt.net
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