[CQ-Contest] Expansion of Skimmer Subject

[Pete Smith]

At 02:53 PM 3/23/2008, Joe Subich, W4TV wrote:
>Nobody has even used CW Skimmer "in anger" yet.  To be
>fretting about fully automated stations is an awfully big
>leap.  I have been watching the stuff that comes out of
>Pete's Skimmer and there is a lot of trash ... in the
>last hour I see three spots for North Korean stations,
>Andaman and Nicobar, one Bhutan, one Macquarie Island,
>and probably two dozen other less "rare" multipliers I
>know to be badly busted calls.

Well, I think the Skimmer vs Human test on the 1999 KCDXC pileup recording 
suggests that it has a lot of potential.

For the last couple of weeks I have been using CW Skimmer with a beta 
version of N1MM Logger that validates Skimmer spots by comparing them to 
the current contest log and to the master.dta file.  This produces a very 
high-quality bandmap, at the cost of perhaps missing a few "uniques" - 
which is, I think, a pretty good tradeoff.  Come to think of it, similar 
validation applied to traditional packet spots might produce a comparable 
improvement.

It is also worth mentioning that even if Skimmer copies the calls 
correctly, there is still a lot of human skill required to execute the S&P 
QSO without losing your running rhythm (or your frequency).

73, Pete