[CQ-Contest] It Is What It Is

[steve.root at culligan4water.com]

The idea of an uneven playing field has nothing to do with operator skills or station size. If you're a better operator, have mastered techiques like SO2R, have superior station building skills and resources, or have innovative new ideas then you're SUPPOSED to win. And I've never seen anything written on this Reflector that would question that principle. Any suggestion to level the field has nothing to do with a Pete Rosell type "parity" or anythiing remotely close to "Harrison Bergeron". 

The uneven field refers to something that you cannot engineer your way around or compenstate for with skills and hardware. I highly doubt people travel to HC8 because they like to look at lizards and turtles, or spend lots of money building stations on D4 because they like high humidity. Geography is an immutable fact of life. You can't underestimate it's effect and you can't do anything about it either. To be blunt, you will NEVER win a DX contest from North Dakota. You probably won't win SS either.

While we can accept the realities of operating where we live, it's difficult to accept a set of rules that exxagerate the inequities. This thread started with the suggestion that CQ consider a relativley small change to their scoring rules that would address one of these inequities (living in a big high population country). That's about it, right Rick?

73 Steve K0SR