[CQ-Contest] Public access to logs

[Dick Green]

> The ultimate solution, for contest logs, is mandatory submission to
> L.O.T.W. There are no 'gray' areas with L.O.T.W. You are either in a
log or not
> in a log, there's no negotiating. If the contest station copied your
call
> wrong 'SORRY you loose'.

Clearly, I'm a supporter of LoTW, but I'm afraid LoTW isn't a solution
to the problem. In fact, it may make the problem a bit worse.

With LoTW, it's not true that you're either in a log or not in a log.
You can submit "corrections" to an LoTW log at any time. The corrected
records are added, but the old records aren't deleted. The contest QSL
manager has no way to revoke the old record. That means the station that
actually made the QSO gets a confirmation, and so does the cheater.
Unless the QSL manager regularly checks on the original record to see if
it got confirmed, which is a time-consuming task no one would bother
doing, he/she won't know that two confirmations were issued for the same
QSO. In a strictly paper-base log, the QSL manager would probably make a
note in the log next to  the supposedly busted-call so that only one
station will get credit, and potentially could detect that a cheater
negotiated his way into the log when the legitimate owner of the QSO
sends in a card.

In theory, LoTW records could be correlated with published contest logs
to prevent any changes to the LoTW log after publication, but it isn't
easy. LoTW doesn't have a concept of a "change" record. In other words,
you can't distinguish between a change and an addition. There's no way
to conclusively identify an added record as one that changes a previous
QSO (the date and time aren't granular enough.) The only way to do it
would be to flag the contest log records as not being changeable, and
reject any added record with the same date, time, frequency and mode.
Unfortunately, the QSL manager could easily circumvent that rule by
slightly increasing or decreasing the QSO time.

73, Dick WC1M