[CQ-Contest] Self Spotting - You May be a Victim

[David Robbins K1TTT]

> DX Summit shows a spot by N1UR in the ARRL DX CW contest.
Interesting,
> I've never spotted anyone in a contest because I am never connected.
The
> occaisional time I do spot a DX Station during normal operating, I
enter
> the
> spot directly on the web, so an @ sign appears next to my call.  This
one
> had no @ sign.

For some reason the -@ doesn't show on the dxsummit search for that
spot, but my node log for k1ttt-14 shows it coming from dxsummit with
the - at .  So I would expect that if that station was self spotting it
would stick out like a sore thumb with the new ip page on there.... 

I did go back and do a quick look at spots for that station, from a
quick eyeball check there appears to be a high percentage of dxsummit
spots for him on Saturday of the contest.  Pulling a couple random ones
that came from dxsummit and checking my node database I see the
following:
7031.6  KP4KE       15-Feb-2003 0117Z  good 599                 KP4
<N9NG>
1830.5  KP4KE       15-Feb-2003 0202Z  West Indies!!!           KP4
<K4TEA>
7035.3  KP4KE       15-Feb-2003 0409Z  caribean island 599      KP4
<W9WS>
7037.7  KP4KE       16-Feb-2003 0222Z  caribean                 KP4
<W3MD>
14032.9  KP4KE       16-Feb-2003 0022Z  caribean Island          KP4
<W3MD>
28028.5  KP4KE       15-Feb-2003 2152Z                           KP4
<W3MD>

relatively unremarkable, except these are the only spots by those 4
stations in the last 6 months.... consider it very rare for a station to
get on once, spot one station, and never spot anything else... consider
it a very strange coincidence that I could randomly pick 3 of them in a
short period of one contest and get 3 spotters like that.  Also, two of
them misspelled Caribbean the same way, in the whole dxsummit database
there are only 10 occurrences of that spelling.

That is a good example of spotting that would have slipped by most of
our old ways of checking, without having the dxsummit ip address data
there is no way to trace these back to any one source.... if this
happens now we should have the data to show that those spots were or
were not put in by the same station and very likely where that station
was.


David Robbins K1TTT
e-mail: mailto:k1ttt at arrl.net
web: http://www.k1ttt.net
AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://dxc.k1ttt.net