[CQ-Contest] Log checking in CQWW

[Michael Coslo]

On Sep 5, 2008, at 6:01 PM, Alfred Frugoli wrote:

> Why not?

Just on this list, we had a log posted, with some interesting  
inferences.

Public posting in and of itself is not the problem, it is what some  
people do with them.

I had an entrant who at one stage in the contest, the mullts were  
lining up for him in such a precise way that I became suspicious. One  
county after the other that he didn't already have just popped into  
the log. Sections too.

Now I could have just decided that this person was cheating. Maybe I  
could have posted it to a list like this one, saying "How is this  
possible?".

But I had the other logs, and I took a look through them. Guess what?  
The Op was NOT cheating. Just as a poker player can get the occasional  
royal flush, or 4 aces, this dude got really lucky. Good for him. Good  
for contesting. That will make a good story to tell fellow Ops. Good  
thing I didn't blab my suspicions, eh?


> Can I post my own log?

It's your log of course. If you did really well in the contest you  
could have it etched in marble! 8^)


> Can I post a link to someone's log instead of the actual log?

I think that making the logs public is a mistake. We are going to have  
innocent people accused of cheating. Especially heinous, is that the  
better a person does, the more people are going to try to prove them  
as cheating. Some times a person is just good.

> I just don't get all the worry about public logs, etc.  Isn't there  
> a piece of amateur radio about mentoring, and elmering, and helping  
> new folks get into the game?  With all this contesting pressure to  
> win and not cheat and to not reveal your secret strategy it's no  
> wonder we're an elete club of greying guys!


Who has pressure to win and cheat? The only pressure I see is to get  
better. This isn't NASCAR or some competition where there are large  
prizes at stake. This is just people and their radios.

Some of us, myself included, are perhaps a little old fashioned. I  
still do deals on a handshake. I still expect my Ham radio peers to be  
ladies and gentlemen until proven otherwise.

That doesn't mean that I am a wimp. My penalties for cheating are  
simple. Buh-bye, yer outa here.

But so many of these proposed strategies are like a person being  
assumed guilty from the get-go, and others disqualify a lot of Ops who  
have no crime other than operating in a fashion that isn't compatible  
(mobiles, remote sites, rovers)

I guess it boils down to killing the hobby by being too trusting, or  
killing it by strangulation, making it so oppressive that to  
participate, a person has to jump through so many hoops that they just  
decide to do something else that weekend.

I still say to people who want to expose corruption and whatever other  
evils there are in Amateur radio contesting to use their energies to  
help contesting. If sponsors had more people helping them, the results  
would be done more quickly, more accurately, and cheaters would be  
found and eliminated more easily.

I know it is a lot easier to complain than to do something about it, a  
whole world of difference between castigation and correction.

-73 de Mike N3LI -