[CQ-Contest] Growing New Contesters with LOTW - suddenly it's 1977again

[Alfred Frugoli]

Pete,

What I don't see is how a cross checked log from a contest sponsor meets the
current ARRL/LOTW security standards.  The log has not been encrypted by the
log submitter.  It was sent as a plain text (ok cabrillo) file to the
contest sponsor, who makes an assumption that the data is from someone in
the real world who actually made these contacts.  Yes, the contacts are
cross checked (just as they are in LOTW), but it's the verification of the
original sender that is missing.

73 de Al, KE1FO

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Visit my amateur radio contesting blog at ke1fo.wordpress.com.

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Pete Smith <n4zr at contesting.com> wrote:

> At 09:55 AM 5/27/2008, Alfred Frugoli wrote:
>
>> I do, however, see the possibility of things going the other way.  At
>> least
>> for ARRL sponsored contests, all electronic logs have to go through LOTW,
>> with a special tag in the file that marks them as contest logs.  Then ARRL
>> exports the contest data from LOTW and does their electronic massaging to
>> get final scores.  CQWW could do the same.  The catch is that every
>> entrant
>> sending an electronic log would have to be signed up for LOTW and develop
>> the skills to get their log encrypted and uploaded.  As we've seen from
>> the
>> initial rollout of LOTW, there is a fair amount of resistance to the
>> signup
>> process, especially in countries outside the US.
>>
>> I too hope that LOTW becomes more functional - I'd love to get my WAZ
>> Award,
>> which I have all the QSO's for through LOTW.  I just don't see any of this
>> coming any time soon
>>
>
>
> I guess I should have expected this topic to devolve into another fruitless
> round of LOTW-bashing.
>
> But seriously, guys -- with good will on both sides and a minimal
> additional effort, the way to implement this is to get the contest sponsors
> and LOTW to work together.  The contest sponsor has a file containing all
> cross-check-verified QSOs; how hard can it be to put that data in a format
> that LOTW can accept, and for LOTW to enter it in its database just like any
> other data transfer from another trusted server?
>
> 73, Pete N4ZR
>
>
>
>