I still don't know how this directly relates to contesting, but here goes.
Dale Martin wrote:
> and a lot more questionable as to validity?
Here lies the heart of the problem.
Awards like DXCC, and Honor Roll, et al, are exactly that. Awards. It's a
piece of paper (I have a couple on my wall), or maybe a plaque, if you're
one of the Deserving. Take your DXCC certificate and a dollar to Denny's,
and they'll give you a cup of coffee--but don't forget the dollar.
The reason LOTW is requiring this complexity and level of digital signatures
is because the importance some hams have placed on the perceived "integrity"
of the program is far beyond the actual intrinsic value of the awards it
relates to. It's an award, not the Holy Grail, and too many people have
obsessed about it way too far for way too long.
This is not a new thing. You can go back 15 years or more to the days when
DXCC was still mountainous stacks of paper records, and people would show up
with massive stacks of cards that all had to be reviewed one at a time, very
carefully, by people who worked long hours with little sleep. Not to mention
the amount of effort expended over whether some little group of rocks is
really a country or not, or whether someone was actually where they say they
were when they operated. To what point, to what end, I ask? In the end, does
it really matter? Should it have ever mattered?
So long as hams view DXCC as the sine que non of amateur radio operating
ability, these viewpoints will always be skewed to what, to me, is an absurd
degree. It's time we stop obsessing about the perceived "validity" of
contacts made and submitted to the DXCC program, and concentrate more on
simply making the contacts themselves.
With malice towards none,
Warren, NF1J/6
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