Jim,
Good point about Rule 4.4.
I think this is a case of the rules being written with Single Op in mind,
not a multi-op situation. And this is why I was referring to the sometimes
questionable choice of a check at certain club stations.
If you are running a club station (under the club call, of course), do you
use as a check:
(a) The year you were first licensed
(b) The year the club was founded
(c) The year the club was licensed
(d) The year the club got it's current call
Now to my thinking, if you are using the club call, then I would go with (c)
the year the club was licensed. And many club stations (especially the old
W#Yx series calls that many colleges & universities have from the 1920's &
early '30's... and those that got their old W#Xx series calls back too, or
some variation thereof) require that as a self-imposed condition of
operating.
Because if you go with (a), then a super script interpretation of 4.4 might
lead some to believe that EACH operator has to use as a check the year that
THEY were first licensed (and if you have an op and a logger working as a
team, especially when they take turns, whose do you use?). Which means that
a given call would be sending out different checks at different times.
Which gets confusing.
However, having said all that, I also recall what happened one year when I
was still up there, when K3CR started out with a check of "72" (the year the
club got the call) until a club officer checked the rules and insisted,
after about 80 QSO's, that we switch to "12" (the year the station was first
licensed... not the club, but the station, and that's a whole 'nother
story). We wrote the ARRL (this was well before e-mail, and yes I'm dating
myself) and the ruling we got back was that for log checking purposes, it
didn't matter WHICH check was sent so long as the other station copied the
RIGHT one, and since we noted in our log why the change had occurred, it was
OK. So far as I know, that is pretty much still the rule of thumb.
Finally, as far as going "back" to the original SS exchange, I believe the
contest was much different in other ways in those days, but in essence, this
is similar to the "QTC" exchange in the WAE, which doesn't thrill me all
that much as it tends to slow the rate down. But that's my opinion, no
knock on the WAE intended.
73, ron wn3vaw
"People hear what they want to hear,
And Disregard the Rest..."
"The Boxer," Simon & Garfunkel, 1970
----- Original Message -----
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2003 07:05:29 -0500
From: "Jim Cain" <cainjim@mindspring.com>
To: <cq-contest@contesting.com>
Subject: [CQ-Contest] The "Check" in SS
I was beginning to wonder if the SS rules had changed, so I checked, so
to speak, and in this case they haven't:
"4.4. Check (the last two digits of the year you were first licensed)."
"You" is a personal pronoun referring to a human, not a station or call
sign. So, shouldn't multi-operator stations send a check corresponding
to who is operating? Then again, since computers now are doing the
operating, perhaps the rule should read "Check (the last two digits of
the year it was first placed into operation)."
The SS originated in the 1930s as a contest emulating CW traffic
handling (that's where the "precedence" comes from -- it's pronounced
"pre see dunce") -- and each contact required a full "message text" to
be sent. Maybe we should go back to this, and software could be written
enabling computers to generate a random message for each contact. The
"check" (number of words in the message) would of course vary from
contact-to-contact.
As Patrick McGoohan said, "I am not a number, I am a real man. "
jim cain, K1TN
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