[CQ-Contest] CQWW - are signal reports optional?

[Dave Lawley]

I didn't hear EI5DI this weekend but if I had, I would have asked
for the RST. It's part of the exchange and, since Paul has admitted
he did not send it, sorry but I feel the entry should be penalised or 
perhaps excluded altogether.

The vast majority of reports are always going to be 599, especially
in a rate contest like CQWW. The fact that almost no-one sends
other than 599, no matter what the circumstance, can I think be blamed
on K1EA, since CT led the way with computer logging and it doesn't let 
you log anything but 599 as the sent exchange. Interestingly, when 
EI5DI was developing his SD contest logger, he added the ability to
log a sent report other than 599 at my request. That doesn't seem to 
be consistent with his campaign to get rid of RS(T) altogether.

This weekend there were three signals, all Europeans, that I found 
so disgusting I sent them a report of 595. Maybe their rigs had just 
developed a fault, but I suspect they like to use a bad note to 
clear a nice big frequency around them. I'll be manually editing 
these sent reports into the Cabrillo log. In the future I'd like to see
RSTs
(and zones) cross-checked in the CQWW contests, and it would seem
to me that if a station receives a lot of reports of a bad note, it could
be
argued their dirty signal was causing excessive QRM and this could
be grounds for penalising the entry. 

>From a US perspective, getting the zone right is not really an issue, 
but my .zon file has just over 100 entries in it and that works out at 
about 6 percent of Ws that weren't in the zone as defaulted by CT. 
I'm hoping that one year the checking software will be enhanced 
to check received zone number. This could result in huge score 
reductions for some entrants outside the US!

Dave G4BUO