[CQ-Contest] Combining SO and SOA from a Gen Xer's point of view

[Shane Mattson-->K1ZR]

It's hard not to get sucked into all of this hype!  

  

Age:  39 (still considered by some to be one of the young guys....gulp) 

  

I'm an operator who prefers finding mults on my own, therefore I favor the traditional SO unassisted category.  When tuning around the bands, especially towards the end of the contest, I get all giddy when I stumble across a new one.  I love that feeling.  It's my opinion that the SO unassisted is the iron man of SO, and like many others I prefer it over all other categories.  I have great respect for the assisted guys however I don't want to be forced into using the cluster in order to be competitive.  I'm making a considerable financial investment to build a competitive DX contest station with the unassisted category in mind.  Despite what some think of the survey, I certainly hope all of this scuttlebutt related to combining SO and SOA into one category is just that....scuttlebutt. 

  

CQWW contest committee:  Is there something that can be done on a large scale to help track down the guys claiming SOU who deliberately use assistance?  With all of the brain power that exists within the contesting fraternity there must be someone out there who can help develop a means of identifying whether or not someone is cheating.  Perhaps our energy should be directed towards finding a solution to this problem rather than contributing to circular threads...?    

  

Any other Gen X or Yers out there in favor of maintaining two separate categories?  Perhaps I'm older than I think, and a bit out of touch with how things will eventually trend.......sigh. 

  

Shane K1ZR