[CQ-Contest] penalty!

[Dan Robbins]

I've been out of town and came back to read the whole discussion of the
1 plus 3 penalty in CQ WW.  Some observations:

1.  Yes, in volleyball and most sports you do get penalized.  However
the most you lose is the value of one score, whether it be a touchdown,
a goal, a basket or a run.  They don't take away 3 extra scores every
time a penalty is incurred.

2.  Mavis Bacon holds typing contests.  CQ and ARRL hold ham radio
contests.
(Mavis Bacon has a software typing tutor.)

3.  If you can't win the argument, call the other guy names.  Whiner is
a good one.

4.  The statement that all are treated fairly by the 1 plus 3 is
definitely not true.  Over the years, I have answered tens of thousands
of contest QSLs and the JA error rate is always considerably higher than
the other QSO mines of USA and EU.  I suspect this is due to the
inclination of lower tier JAs to not correct their call immediately, but
to call again later.  The burden may be on the other station to make
sure you get his call correct, but not all JAs do this in the way we
would like.  In short, if you work a lot of JAs, your error rate will be
higher than someone who works mostly USA/EU.  There is a geographical
bias, and the 1 plus 3 penalty makes it worse.

5.  The penalty is made to hurt.  Indeed, here's an example.  In last CQ
WW CW I finally got an opening to W1/W2 on 80.  The signals were loud,
but there was a ton of multipath echoes making the copy difficult.  I
could work the guys at a reasonable rate for 80, but I knew the error
rate would have been high.  With a loss of one QSO for a busted call I
would have stayed and handed out the double mult.  With a loss of one
plus 3 it was not worth it, I switched the antenna and started working
JAs whose signals were clear.  The W1/W2 guys got hurt.  How many mults
have you lost because some guy was scared to stay on a multipath or
static-filled band?

6.  K6LA said that after reviewing tapes, he thought the log checking
program did about 95% accuracy. That is certainly good enough to detect
cheaters, which is the main purpose of log checking.  But that level of
accuracy is not nearly good enough for the 1 plus 3 penalty.  Most of
the better operators copy at considerably better than 95%.  The
inaccuracy of the log checking program is magnified by 4 times.  Since
we can never have 100 percent accuracy, the penalty should be reduced to
1 QSO to minimize effects of log checking inaccuracy.

7.  It seems that at least some of the -N (not in log) are due to the
fact that the other guy had later reservations about the call and chose
to remove it from the log.  Why did he remove it?  Because he feared the
1 plus 3 penalty.  Many of these guys seem to refuse to believe that my
call has only a single letter sufffix.  KL7Y?  Even if they get the call
correct and I am 100 per cent sure they have it right, it does not
always show up in their final log.  Every WW contest I seem to lose one
or two mults for this very reason.

I hope those who are blindly defending the 1 plus 3 penalty will take
the time to reconsider.  It is time for a change.

                                               Dan KL7Y (yes only one
letter in the suffix!)


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