[CQ-Contest] Random acts of kindness, Unassisted Categories, Rules, etc.

[Ken Widelitz]

Tree, et. al.,

Technological innovation is inevitable. It won't be too long before your
bandscope shows the callsigns of every station on the band. Will that make
you "unassisted?"

Clearly, this ("random acts of kindness") is a slippery slope with no
possible resolution of enforcement, unless the entire HF spectrum is
recorded during the contest and a large squad of referees listens to each
competitive station's entire effort, which just ain't gonna happen. OTOH,
the log checking capacity is currently such that someone using packet and
submitting unassisted will be caught.

If the rules are changed to specifically prohibit acting on "random acts of
kindness" they will be unenforceable, but in such circumstances I would have
to ignore the random act of kindness. In the "fairness" example you gave
where one station stops CQing to find a needed mult and the other station
gets a "random act of kindness" my only response is that the operative word
is "RANDOM."

73, Ken, K6LA / VY2TT