[CQ-Contest] Non-Assisted vs. Assisted

[Felipe J. Hernández]

Martin,Stan


I agree with both of you, its very clear that being assisted is something
that might benefit some and damage others, I seem to
be in the latter group, I run assisted and usually make the same score as
my  unassisted version, I beat my mults by a lot but QSOS suffer big time,
this even with a full SO2R setup and good so2r skills.


But it was proven a few years back that very skilled operators seem to do
much better assisted than not, it was the case of
N5TJ at VE3EJ with a huge record that hasnt been broken by other North
American dx operations and also Tonno ES5TV
a couple of years ago also did the experiment and it was obvious that it
helped his game quite a bit.

If you can make good desicions on a contest and have a solid plan you will
certainly will reap benefits from packet and skimmer
because you will not be sidetracked by the "interruptions" from running
assisted.
Now the question is how many "Regular ops" will actually receive the
benefit of improving their score on assisted... If you ask me me
it doesnt matter, since  the personal satisfaction is never the same when
you run assisted vs not.

I personally think that we are becoming more lazy with time and packet
makes it all more level playing or at least less struggling...

My position is that it would be unfair to mix all in one, is my true belief
that the top 5 on mayor contests are good righteous operators.. Its on the
hands of the committee and the operators to deal with it, there are
technical ways to make it harder for people to cheat..

For example it occurs to me that creating controls at the software level,
like for example that Single ops non assisted  would use a contest/version
that doesnt allow packet or a connection from another computer that could
avoid feeding  the information to another machine or software to analize
spots.

Also some tracking of the second radio or second vfo, its possible, theres
a lot of information that the CAT interfaces can provide
and there are plenty of minds capable of achieving this.

Contesting is great and people love their non-assited ,assisted , multis
etc... theres something for everyone, lets not change
just because people cheat, lets find the controls and adopt technology not
technology trends.


Felipe
NP4Z