[CQ-Contest] Thoughts from a sponsor on one hour log deadlines

[Michael Coslo]

On May 14, 2008, at 9:44 PM, Marty Durham wrote:
> All true...but how many ham's do NOT have more than one e-mail  
> account? I'm
> willing to bet most everyone has hotmail, yahoo, or gmail as well  
> as a more
> 'standard' ISP.
>
> And in all the years that I've been using e-mail (pushing 20 now) I  
> can't
> recall but one or two instances in the 'early' days of a prolonged
> outage...oh, and when the cable provider was offline for 3 weeks after
> Hurricane Ivan rolled through Pensacola...but I had DSL too...and  
> it was
> back online as soon as the power was up.

	That's pretty good. Wish I could say the same. Your experience is  
one data point, But there are hundreds and even thousands of people  
trying to get mail to me, an error rate of just one percent could  
leave quite a few people out of luck.

I hope you aren't suggesting that Ops email us their logs from every  
email  account that they own? Ebombing the sponsor is not a solution  
to anything. Having multiple submissions from Ops will just make  
things slower during that one hour window.

In addition, I sometimes get an Op who has had a computer problem who  
ends up making an excel file. Sometimes something just isn't correct  
and needs fixed. I'd just as soon have a repaired log (like if the  
time was set to local instead of UT) than DQ the fellow.

If we granted exceptions there would be a whole lot of them:

Rovers
Mobiles
Most County line stations
Portables

It just doesn't accomplish anything useful to require a one hour  
submission deadline. It would certainly serve to DQ many more honest  
Ops than any cheaters, who can be found using other methods.

What is needed is a view of a bigger picture, not one of thinking  
that every Op is using an identical operation, has access to the web  
continuously, and has a logging program that spits out a perfect log.  
Some Ops just don't have access to the web from where they are  
operating.

	- 73 de N3LI -