[CQ-Contest] Score Reduction Penalties Are Good Policy

Norton, Richard Richard.Norton at dsto.defence.gov.au
Thu Nov 12 13:55:05 EST 1998


GET THE CALL RIGHT BEFORE YOU "LOG" THE QSO!

Having the 4 for 1 penalty for mis-copied calls is simply good policy.

1) It promotes accurate radio communication.

2) It rewards operator skill and knowledge.

3) It discourages fraud, near-fraud, and pretend-contest-operating.

Most contests grant credit for many, many totally unverified contacts.
In many winning logs, less than 25 percent of the contacts are verified.
The penalty helps maintain some semblance of order under this situation.

Without the penalty, for stations running high-rate, it is advantageous to
quickly guess at calls, mumble them rapidly intimidating people into
thinking they are copied correctly, and hardly ever correct them. The loss
from simply having a non-multiplier QSO removed because the call was
mis-copied is less than the cost of going back two or three times to get the
call right. This type of pretend-operating was rampant 30 years ago.

GET THE CALL RIGHT BEFORE YOU "LOG" THE QSO!

It is not good policy to ever encourage logs to be sent in with incorrectly
copied calls. The entrant whose call was mis-copied may have worked very
hard to make the contact . It may have been a multiplier or double
multiplier for him. It is poor policy to give the rare, running-station the
slightest incentive not to log the calls correctly. Although some sponsors
try to give credit where the other guy mis-copies your call, note that
software does not detect all logging errors, only ones thought to be common.

GET THE CALL RIGHT BEFORE YOU "LOG" THE QSO!

It is poor policy to encourage logs to be sent in with incorrectly copied
calls for another reason. There is no reason to burden log checkers and
computer programs with score-reduction decisions. Contest log checking would
be a much more pleasant environment to operate in without confrontations
with either the mis-copier or the mis-copied.

GET THE CALL RIGHT BEFORE YOU "LOG" THE QSO! 

Get the message?

73,

Dick N6AA/VK5


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