[CQ-Contest] IARU HF Championship - A Travesty

[George Fremin III]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 02:49:35PM -0400, Steve London wrote:

> It's good to see some others speaking out about cheating in the IARU
> HF Championship. Let me see if I can use history to help others
> understand how we got to this sorry state of affairs....

Yes, it is good to see some sunlight being shined on the cheating but
it is sad for me to see that the cheating only seems to be 
getting worse in the IARU contest.

I really like the IARU contest. 



> Long ago, back in the late 70's, there were no HQ multipliers.

Yep and into the 80's - it was a great contest - I loved it.
The pool of possible locations that the contest could be won
from was very large.  It was not skewed based on your distance from
Europe.  But that really is just a result of what I consider to
be a bad rule change - a change that I think hurts the contest.


> Now the HQ stations have taken on a life of their own, with fierce
> and unethical competition between countries for bragging
> rights. This has led to rampant cheating. For example, does anyone
> really believe that in 2005, DA0HQ worked 2390 unique stations (or,
> at least unique operators) on 160 meters ?  I have heard a recording
> of the DA0HQ 160 meter operation - a classic case of reading calls
> from a pre-arranged list of DL callsigns. In the same contest,
> next-door neighbor TM0HQ only worked 705 stations on 160 meters.


I have found the HQ station unethical operating and manufactured contacts 
to be really distasteful over the years - and it only seems to be 
getting worse.  Indeed this same sort of behavior spilled over into
the WRTC last year during this event with a number of teams having
many unique QSOS with their home countries.  It was nice to see the 
WRTC log checking remove all of the unique contacts and fix the problem
for the WRTC competition.  It is too bad this sort of log checking
could not be extended to IARU contest as well.

>  And here's another consequence of this being an IARU contest ---
> Some IARU member societies have convinced their national, government
> funded, sporting organizations that this is an international event
> worthy of financial awards to their countrymen, should their
> countrymen be the world "gold medal" winner. Might this help some of
> you understand the impressive (and unbelievable) QRP and low power
> scores ?

So, they are getting money for winning a contest by cheating?
This is really bad - and clearly points out that we either need
to kill this contest off or start checking the logs and 
maybe even making station visits during the event to 
ensure that the winners are really worthy of the money they
are being paid.    


> and contest adjudication (or eliminate the IARU contest entirely).

I will write to the ARRL/IARU and demand that we improve the adjudication
of the IARU.

>  2) Enjoy a beautiful July weekend with your spouse, kids or
> signficant other, rather than operating the radio.

Though it saddens me to miss a contest I really enjoy and have 
won (SSB HP USA) many times - I will sit out the IARU contest.

I will really miss the IARU contest.


> 3) Discourage the WRTC-2010 committee (SRR, RZ3AA, RA3AUU) from
> using the IARU HF Contest for the selection of WRTC-2010
> competitors.

I think this is the right answer - even though my high
placing in IARU contests was one of the factors that allowed me
to qualify for the WRTC.  But it appears the IARU is tainted 
and broken and only getting worse. 


-- 
George Fremin III - K5TR
geoiii at kkn.net
http://www.kkn.net/~k5tr