[CQ-Contest] Remote Site Contesting Rules

[Steve Harrison]

At 08:56 AM 3/17/2007 -0500, Gerry Hull wrote:
>Nope, like I said before, this is not what I got my licence for.

Me, neither.

>The TenTec Omni VII is a very interesting radio...  It has a 10baseT
>connection for remote control... Too bad that control has to be via 
>a computer...  Hams are hung up with the interface... If the OMNI-VII 
>control panel itself was able to be "remoteed" across the internet, 
>then you would be sitting in front of a radio, using the same skills 
>and time-honored methodologies to master the airwaves, yet the physical
>transmitter/receiver would be located elsewhere.

Quite a few of us will never be able to afford something like even an Orion
VI until they're at least two decades old. I'm just now able to afford a
20-yr-old TS680S, which I THOUGHT would finally relegate my TS120Ses and
130Ses to "backup", 2nd, or mobile radios. That is, until I discovered the
later 680S is a really crappy strong-signal radio and the older 120es and
130es run rings around it  ;o\  ;o\  ;o\

>I'll bet many hams would love to be able to experience propagation and 
>competition from another portion of the world...   Let the "black hole"
>ops try out the east coast, etc.

Imagine: call CQ on 3.505 real late at night from Connecticut, get an
answer from a guy out in Arizona running 100W and a low inverted vee, and
he's curious what he sounds like at your own average home station in Conn.
So the two of youse hooks up via the I-net and he operates YOUR radio while
you operate HIS radio, thus hearing what each other hears.

VEELLLLLYYY inneresting indeed......

You can carry that further to where each of youse operates each other's
station right from the comfort of your own homes during some contest; I see
nothing wrong with that, as long's yer both honest in terms of reporting
yer actual radio-antler location.

Imagine a new cottage industry: you go advertising on contesting.com to
"swap" stations for a weekend with someone else, somewhere else, throughout
the world, for the upcoming contest weekend.

KF3Q would no longer have to fly to WP3R or wherever to wipe out the rest
of us in SS; he'd just sit at home and control it completely remotely.

Imagine the newest Ladder competition: each week, everybody operates
SOMEONE ELSE'S station, thus really putting op skills on display when
someone consistently gets 60 Qs each week from each of a dozen stations
spread all across the NA continent.... all through the i-net while sitting
comfortably in front of yer own computator. I'm sure someone'll figger out
ways to get around the latency problem.

Wanna kill someone's op-skills reputation? Do sumpin to handicap yer own
station while they're operating it from their machine
===================8-O  (toss in some chirp or key clix, force em to put up
with scads of folks complaining about their signal...)

Ya heard it here first  8-))))))

Research-wise, such a system would prove very interesting while evaluating
your own antennas, for example. I could monitor the effect of changes to my
antlers while listening to myself in deepest, darkest Connecticut through,
for example, N6TR's antlers.

>I'm sure they would disagree with you that what they are doing is not
>the same "ham radio" that you got your ticket for.

I originally got my ticket to see whether I could work WAS/DXCC within the
year-span of my Novice license. Then when my General arrived, it became a
quest to see how quickly I could work WAS/DXCC. Then before and after the
Extra arrived, it became a quest to see how well I could do in the CD
parties, then the W/VE contest.....  etc. ad nauseum. Somewhere during all
that, the great Alaska earthquake happened and passing traffic from the
affected areas became one of my interests fer a few weeks, which morphed
into continued NTS activity for a decade afterward till the demise of the
CD parties and CW traffic began dropping off. Operating someone else's
station was never of particularly great interest although I'll admit when I
was a young tyke oh-yay-so-high and could walk out into my front yard and
look up the Hill and see the tops of the poles holding up the rhombics, I
did occasionally wonder what it'd be like to be sitting in the middle of
Don Wallace's forest of S-lines, switching from rhombic to rhombic....
;o)))))

Steve, K0XP