Guys,
To quote Mike W7VO, "You bring up a great point, Ken! I had never thought of
it that way, and you are right. The only way an unassisted station can say
he is truly unassisted is to not be spotted by another operator, or by a
robot. I guess one needs to clarify the rules that unassisted stations
cannot run, they must stick with strictly S&P. Makes sense to me!"
Think about the effect of being spotted causing a station to be considered
assisted - you can sabotage all your competitors by spotting them (or if you
don't want to be seen using the spotting network, having a friend do it),
and they can do the same to you. So, no one will be unassisted, and everyone
loses (wins?). My earlier post about doing away with assisted vs unassisted
was in response to all these arguments was based on the constant change to
bring in new ways of operating and contesting, and the fact that it's not
black-and-white what constitutes assisted (at least not to me). There are
some obvious cases for both (using DX clusters is assisted, having no
internet connection and no local FM radio on is unassisted). For power
categories, it's easy - less than so many (depends on contest) Watts is QRP,
less than so many other Watts is LP, and more than so many Watts is HP. You
can also count the number of radios, transmitters and operators, so no gray
area there, I suppose. Antenna categories (WIRES, tribanders, etc.) are
usually clearly defined.
I don't think we'll ever reach a happy solution, or even consensus, so I'll
stop trying to convince everyone, and leave it to the contest organizers for
each event to define the categories.
See you all this weekend for CQ WPX CW!
73,
Eric NC6K
PS - Did anyone else start singing "All the assisted ops, where do they all
come from?" to the tune of Eleanor Rigby???
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