[CQ-Contest] Contest ON/OFF times

[Jim Cain]

There are two kinds of people: Those who divide people into two groups and those who don't.

There are contesters who remember Rubber Clocking and contesters who don't.

I am intimately familiar with Rubber Clocking. Not that I ever did it, because I never operated a contest for the fully allowed time. Rather, because from about late 1974 to early 1977 I, and one assistant (Bill Jennings, R.I.P.) checked submitted ARRL contest logs by hand. This included doing dupe sheets on the big logs by hand (on ARRL Operating Aid #6) and calculating the score on a primitive solid state pocket calculator. 

And -- ! -- it also included identifying Rubber Clockers, which really wasn't all that hard. Some of those paper logs just smelled all the way from the Mail Room

In the Paper Log Era, even I was smart enough to figure out that you write down as little information as possible. One of the shortcuts was to log the time every ten minutes, or so. So it was easy for the Rubber Clockers to ply their evil, despicable trade. Heck, even among the privileged the timepiece of choice was a Numecron clock. As hard as it may be for the young and unbaptised to understand, we were not logged into the National Bureau of Standards 24/7. You started operating when the bands exploded with signals and stopped when they went dead. You took a break when you got tired and turned over a 30-minute egg timer.

Now, for the Big Guns, I suggest the following: Edit your Cabrillo log and massage the times to ensure you are just under the operating limit, or, as Tree so aptly suggested in a slightly different context, get your time down to 23.59.99.999.999. (If you walk halfway to a wall, then halfway again, then again, will you ever hit the wall?)

Then go organize your sock drawer. Then organize it again.

Jim Cain, K1TN/9  

(P.S. to K6LL: You started this thread, and I got your point right away. If you've been "doing it wrong" for 45 years, you are two years ahead of me. And your post inspired me to look at my own CW SS LRC, which was fascinating. Those half-dozen exchanges I supposedly miscopied were obviously transmitted wrong.)

(P.P.S. IRLP sucks but it was just a news story.)