[CQ-Contest] Improper packet spotting?

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 05:28:12PM -0500, Tom Frenaye wrote:

> What's wrong with spotting members of your own club, by the way.   That's 
> been done by all of the big clubs for years.   

A competitive station spots itself during a contest.  The objective is to 
attract users of the DX spotting network to call this competitive station 
and provide it with more QSOs, possibly more multipliers, and thereby 
increase its score, beyond what it would be able to acheive with just its
own radio station and operating skills.  This is unsportsmanlike and banned 
in basically every radiosport contest.

Several members of a competitive club entering the club competition of a 
contest spot their fellow club members during the contest.  The objective
is to attract users of the DX spotting network to call these club members
and provide them with more QSOs, possibly more multipliers, and thereby
increase the overall club score, beyond what the club would be able to 
achieve with just their own radio stations and operating skills.  In my 
opinion, this is unsportsmanlike, and I think clubs that are clearly engaging 
in this sort of behaviour are basically cheating.  

That it is a more difficult task to figure out how to effectively identify
this latter form of unsportsmanlike behavior than it is in the case of a 
single self-spotting station does not (in my opinion) make "club self-spotting"
any less wrong.

-- 
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Kenneth E. Harker      "Vox Clamantis in Deserto"      kharker at cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin                   Amateur Radio Callsign: WM5R
Department of the Computer Sciences          Central Texas DX & Contest Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124                         Maintainer of Linux on Laptops
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA            http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
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