[CQ-Contest] Skimmer spots compared to human spots

[Bob Naumann]

K3TN said:

" During a contest it really doesn't help if a bad spot goes out and then 10
people either send out announces or odd new spots to chastise the
mis-spotter."

I have to disagree with this. If the person who sent out the bad spot is
corrected, it's not likely that he'll spot T30S (T Three Zero S) again when
he hears HA30S (H A Three Zero S) the next time.

The same is not true with skimmer/RBN. Whatever the cause is: QRM, choppy
sending, lack of a half-space, etc., the skimmer/RBN re-spots that same
station wrongly over and over and over and over again.

What happens outside of contests is completely irrelevant to what we're
talking about here.

W5OV

-----Original Message-----
From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of
jpescatore at aol.com
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 5:04 AM
To: CQ-Contest at CONTESTING.COM
Subject: [CQ-Contest] Skimmer spots compared to human spots


My experience with accuracy of spots is very different than W5OV's. Using
the N1MM software, I have a choice of spot sources,and combinations of
sources. When my only choices were the "human driven" clusters, the
innacuricies drove me nuts. BY instead of 6Y alone was annoying - plus the
amazing number of North Koreans spotted... Then add in the spotting of
stations that were actually answering CQs, including people spotting answers
to their *own* CQs. During a contest it really doesn't help if a bad spot
goes out and then 10 people either send out announces or odd new spots to
chastise the mis-spotter.

I spend plenty of time day to day DXing and contests actually mask the
horrible innaccuracy level of the global cluster systems - the flood of good
contester-create contest spots is like a fresh clean rain thinning out a
badly polluted stream!

When the RBN came along, I tried using it in conjunction with the people
driven spotting and saw the innacuracies in both - from day one the skimmer
spots had a higher level of accuracy on the first day of the contest. On the
second day, when so many calls were already worked and filtered out, the
accuracy level seemed lower. But he RBN accuracy a year or two ago improved
quite a bit - to me to the point where it is clearly higher than the
aggregated people-driven spots.

When you look at that list of spot sources in N1MM or other contesting
software, it is like looking at your TV dial - you can choose any channel,
not choose to ever switch to certain channel or not watch at all. If you
find one source is more accurate than the other, turn the dial that way.

John K3TN
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