[CQ-Contest] Cheating as a moral issue

[David Gilbert]

"Until then I think the public outing of the perpetrators and life time 
bans are sufficient. "

Yeah, that's actually the problem ... those don't happen.   You see 
people posting all the time about cheating instances that they are aware 
of, yet they almost never post the callsign of the perpetrator.   Hams 
who do speak out against competitors they have reason to believe are 
cheating are themselves publicly vilified (check back in the CQ-Contest 
reflector archives and you'll see what I mean).  A couple of years ago I 
was looking at online pictures from Dayton that showed several hams 
getting chummy with an east European ham that had just been disqualified 
from one of the major contests instead of treating him as a pariah.  
Hams caught blatantly cheating are allowed to withdraw their logs or 
reclassify them instead of receiving a lifetime ban.

We get what we deserve.

Please don't get me wrong ... any contest that forces me to prove I 
didn't cheat is a contest that I won't be entering.  I'm not going to be 
paying the penalty for someone else's bad behavior.

But we wouldn't need to even be discussing such things if we all simply 
decided to excise the cheaters from our midst.

Dave  AB7E



On 9/14/2012 8:16 AM, W0MU Mike Fatchett wrote:
> When the prizes for a Amateur radio contest equate to serious cash you 
> can talk to me about video and audio recording and having to hire an 
> entire staff to make sure the rules are followed.  Until then I think 
> the public outing of the perpetrators and life time bans are sufficient.
>
> This is supposed to be for fun and to hone our message handling skills.
>
> W0MU