[CQ-Contest] Let's ban "inband", too

[Radio K0HB]

Thank you, Ward!  Beautifully stated.


73, de Hans, K0HB/4ID






🌵Sent from Arizona 🌞

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Ward Silver <hwardsil at gmail.com> wrote:

>  > You can't manage yourself so you petition the organizers to change the
>  > rules.  Crazy!
> Well, let's just put up straw man arguments and knock them down, shall 
> we?  Did I petition the organizers?  No.  They changed the rules on 
> their own in response to what they, as contest managers who deal with 
> the real data, perceived as detrimental to the competition they desire 
> to create. I happen to agree that a some kind of change is needed 
> because of the effects of such  behavior that is increasing with every 
> contest.
>  > Isn't contesting a competition?  When I compete in the contest it is to
>  > MAXIMIZE MY SCORE, not yours!  What you might consider bad sportsman
>  > ship is maximizing my score.
> What's to stop someone from posting bogus spots on your frequency then?  
> It violates no FCC regulation or contest rule and certainly maximizes 
> THEIR score relative to yours and that's supposedly all that counts.  No 
> ID?  No problem!  Be careful what you wish for.
>  > I am not intentionally wasting your time
>  > by not Identifying, I happen to have a huge pileup of people that know
>  > who I am.  What makes you so special that I need to change my operating
>  > habits because you happened to find me?
> Really - and how do all of these people know the running station's 
> call?  Was it on the Internet or something?  Are they just guessing?  
> Are they dupes?  The runner has no idea - they are just depending on 
> general confusion and the caller's goodwill to gain a benefit they deny 
> to the caller. By intentionally and willfully violating the underlying 
> quid pro quo that both stations identify sufficiently to conduct their 
> business effectively, the running station gains time at the expense of 
> the caller's time, at minimum, and at a significant multiple if there 
> are more than one station waiting for the running station to ID. The 
> problem is obvious to anybody who's been running pileups for the past 
> few years.  If you want data, look at dupe rates from running stations 
> and busted call rates for stations using spotting for starters.
>  > Where do we want to take this?
> Don't make this out to be more than it is. Sports create and add new 
> rules because it is agreed on that certain types of conduct confer an 
> unwarranted advantage.  Spitballs, holding, tripping, delay of game - 
> the rules prohibiting these invented behaviors and many more were 
> created to preserve the essential conduct of the game.  They were a 
> response to somebody starting whatever it was and enough people 
> eventually misbehaving that it had to be reined in because it was 
> damaging the competition.  And that's exactly what we have here - more 
> and more of this non-IDing behavior in response to ubiquitous broadband 
> spotting.
> No rule must be perfectly enforceable - there are no such rules. What's 
> needed is to establish a standard for conduct on the air, whether by 
> guideline or rule, so that the natural desire to maximize one's score by 
> any means possible is balanced by defining what is allowed.  Speed 
> limits don't eliminate speeding but they do set a public standard for 
> behavior and that's what is needed here.
> If the not-IDing-as-pileup-management technique was not becoming 
> excessive then we wouldn't need to have this conversation at all. Like 
> most similar situations, the give and take of competition is quite 
> tolerable until somebody decides they're special and stops cooperating.  
> Then a few more folks see that they can get away with it, too, and 
> pretty soon we have a problem - the usual "tragedy of the commons" 
> situation in which a few spoil things for many.  Of course, I'm assuming 
> "the many" actually care about exchanging information primarily over the 
> air.  Given trends, that's  possibly a questionable assumption.
> In the broader sense of where radiosport is going, networked 
> distribution of information about signals on the air isn't going away by 
> any means - in fact, it's expanding rapidly - so we're going to need 
> some kind of limitation that constrains the primary channel of 
> information to be over the air.  Or, we can decide that the spotting 
> technology is so ubiquitous that ID'ing isn't required at all except to 
> satisfy whatever regulatory limits exist for the transmitting station.  
> Your call.
> 73, Ward N0AX
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