[CQ-Contest] Kudos to CQ WW for Busting Packet Cheaters!

[Marty Tippin]

At 09:38 AM 7/21/2001 , Bill Tippett wrote:

>         Just got my August CQ and read the following in the section titled
>"Packet":
>
>"The CQ WW Contest Committee has developed the means of extracting
>information supplied to us by sysops from around the world and applying it
>to a questionable log.  By these means we found several operators in the SSB
>contest who did not claim the assisted category but used packet.  Their
>calls do not appear in the score listings."
>
>         VERY BIG KUDOS AND THANK YOU to the CQ WW Committee!

This sounds pretty fishy to me. What "means" did they use to figure out who 
was using packet? The only possible information packet sysops could 
maintain would be login history, showing that XY1PDQ logged in at some 
certain time. And even then, just by virtue of being logged into a packet 
cluster, there's no guarantee that the operator *used* the packet cluster 
in such a way that it would put him in the assisted category. One can login 
and post spots without ever seeing an incoming spot from someone else, 
which isn't a violation of the rules.


But, now that we know they're looking for this kind of behavior, it only 
takes a tiny bit of creative energy to get around their system completely 
(assuming, as I believe to be the case, that the vast majority of packet 
cluster users are now using the Internet to access the cluster rather than 
those "old-fashioned" TNCs): Simply log in to the packet cluster using some 
callsign other than your own. And don't post any spots. Completely 
untraceable. All they've really done is catch the idiots who weren't smart 
enough to do this in the first place.

If people want to cheat, they'll cheat. And most of them will get away with 
it and nobody will ever know. I'd much rather see them find a way to crack 
down on those who run 2, 3 or more kilowatts in the contest. Don't tell me 
they don't exist, because I know they do.  And the high power stations who 
claim low power.

And now I've gotten too consumed with writing this e-mail and lost my run 
frequency in the NAQP RTTY contest. Doggone it.

73,

-Marty NW0L
  martyt at pobox.com


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