[CQ-Contest] Erroneous Ten Minute Violations

[Dave - AB7E]

Yeah, I had the same thought myself.  My logger (N1MM) uses the computer clock, which is regularly updated online and is rarely off by even a few seconds, but if the log checking process looks at other logs to verify the time it could obviously cause problems.  It almost seems like this would be such an obvious opportunity for false errors that it wouldn't be the case, but who knows.  False ten minute violations were common last year and made a lot of people quite angry so I'm really surprised it didn't get fixed, whatever the cause was.

The rule exists to keep claimed M/S operations from being M/M operations in practice.

73,
Dave   AB7E



------Original Mail------
From: "Zack Widup" <w9sz.zack at gmail.com>
To: "CQ Contest" <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:42:31 -0500
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Five DQ's Mark 2008 CQ WW SSB

I don't know how they determine this. Do they look at the times in other
peoples' logs? What if you work several people in a row whose clocks are all
off by a few minutes? It could happen, no matter how unlikely. That may make
it appear you were violating the 10-minute rule.

Why does that rule exist, anyway?

73, Zack W9SZ

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Dave - AB7E <xdavid at cis-broadband.com>wrote:

>
>
> Agreed.  A friend of mine joined me for a M/S effort in the 2008 CQ WW CW
> contest, and our UBN report shows we were dinged for ten violations of the
> ten minute rule.  I checked our log carefully (which had NOT been altered)
> and found that only two of them were valid ... the rest clearly had ten
> minutes or more spacing.  That seems to be an ongoing unresolved problem
> with the scoring process that has been discussed here before, but the point
> is that we simply were penalized for the "violations" and our entry
> classification remained M/S.
>
> 73,
> Dave   AB7E
>
>