[CQ-Contest] Uniques not counting and emotion

[Tree]

Mark, AA6DX writes:

> Having gotten old(er)-- read, arthritis, with minimal antennnas, and 
> sometimes unable to commit time for a contest, I make a few contacts, 
> sometimes to say "hello" to old friends, or just work a few strong signals 
> on the band.  These are VALID contacts ..  for the contester.. why, oh why, 
> should my REAL QSO be ousted from that contester\s effort.........???// 

I am sure many people are asking themselves this same question.

In general - there are very few cases when uniques are removed from logs.  I
know some contests around the world do this, and at least one contest I know
of will not count QSOs in your log unless they receive the other log 
verifying the QSO.

As far as I know in the contests that I have been involved with, uniques are 
not removed.  They happen.  As I mentioned in my last posting, I was a unique
QSO from KL7 in the CW Sprint for W6EEN/N6RT - after an hour of trying.

Uniques will be looked at carefully however, to see if they might be a 
busted callsign.  The higher your unique rate (when compared to the 
average), the more likely that you have a higher error rate (again when
compared to the average).  One way of looking at this is to say "everyeone
is going to work some percentage of uniques - which is pretty constant. 
Over and above that, your uniques are going to be due to busted callsigns.
Let's not count uniques at all - and the results are more meaningful since
everyone gets penalized the same for "valid uniques".  However, the emotion
associated with uniques generally prevents this from being adopted by very
many contests.

In the WRTC, we had a situation that was not "normal" - where there was some
kind of systematic unique generation taking place.  This is all documented in
the very excellent letter written by K1ZZ and you can read it here:

http://www.wrtc2006.com/release59.html

This was a specific case where the judges and log checking team looked at 
the data we had - and decided the best way to deal with the situation was 
to count the unqiue QSOs in ALL of the WRTC logs as dupes - or zero points.  
There were no penalties.  If you look carefully at the log check report 
and listen to the audio file that was recently posted, you can hear four 
of these "QSOs".

When I look at the major competitors in a contest like the ARRL SS CW, I see
very few uniques in the logs that don't end up being busted callsigns.  You
always see fewer uniques in CW logs than SSB.  Occasionally, you see a large
number of uniques - and I experienced that during some of my initial 
operations from W5WMU.  It seemed many of the locals would get on and give me
"unique" QSOs to "help out".  Over the years, I have made it clear to them
that I would rather they worked more people so they weren't so "unique".  My
typical number of uniques now in the SS CW can be counted on one hand.  

If someone mentions removing uniques from the logs - the impact to my score
would be very small.  However, if someone is busting a lot of callsigns, or
has a bunch of people who only get on to work one station, it would have a
much larger impact.

In extreme cases, where you are trying to have a meaningful competition, and
you have some people who work hundreds of QSOs that nobody else has access
to, you have to make extreme decisions.   We did not feel that a station
should be able to count QSOs that were basically manufactured out of someone's
imagination.  Having a few "good" unique QSOs is the price that everyeone of
the WRTC stations had to pay as a result.   

This generated a lot of discussion about uniques - an emotional topic for 
many people.

For me, the actions of the teams that had high unique rates after the fact
are important to me.  Are they going to do what I did at W5WMU?  Time will
tell.  I don't think the majority of us want to be beaten by someone in a 
contest just because they were able to work hundreds of their friends after
being spotted on packet.  We would like to see a more level playing field
where the best operator with the best station in the best location has the
best chance to win.

Tree N6TR
tree at kkn.net