[CQ-Contest] Spots, Lies and Audio Tapes - a proposal

[john at kk9a.com]

About ten years ago I played with contest audio recording.  Most of the
time it worked well however a few times it did not.  Once during an off
time I checked my email and the email ding apparently caused the rest of
the recording to become corrupt. Once it did not record at all do to
operator error. Twice while operating from Aruba I had a power failure and
this caused the entire recording segment to be lost. It is also possible
to have a bad plug/jack connection, RFI or other issues, especially if you
are using your sound card for other things simultaneously for other things
such voice keying and you would never know that you had a problem until
the end of the contest. Obviously since recording was not a requirement I
did not spend much pre-contest time setting it up and testing it, but
there is no guaranty that it will work. Imagine having your first CQWW win
only to discover later that your recordings were corrupt. There have been
gaps in much more important recordings than ham contests. How would all of
these gigabytes of data be transferred and stored? What needs to be
recorded, both sides of the QSO or only the received audio? For now I
think that the WW committee should just recommend that we record our
operation.

John KK9A


To:	<cq-contest at contesting.com>
Subject:	[CQ-Contest] Spots, Lies and Audio Tapes - a proposal
From:	"Scott K0DQ" <k0dq at analog.org>
Date:	Tue, 26 May 2015 14:40:27 -0400



THE PROBLEM:

Regrettably, in spite of KE3X's superb post, the audio recording option
under the Observer program was removed in the 2nd Draft of CQWW Rules.  I
believe that is a mistake, akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.


73,

Scott, K0DQ