[CQ-Contest] Cheating

[James Duffey]

Hans - It is straight forward to calculate the percentage of hams that play by the rules in ham contesting and it is less than the 99.99% number you claim.

Consider: Not counting check logs, there were 7,899 entrants to the 2015 CQ WW SSB DX contest. 39 of those were disqualified for not following the rules. Cheating if you will.  That would put the occurrence of honest operators in CQ WW SSB DX at about 99.5%, not 99.99%. That ignores the warnings distributed about questionable behavior, which were about the same number, and the people who don’t get caught. You may think the difference between the two percentages small, but it is the difference between the 39 who cheated in  a single contest and only one being cheating (actually less than one, but humans occur in integer quantities). 

We tend to view the world on the basis of our own local personal interactions and observations. If your neighborhood of hams that you interact with is 99.99% playing by the rules, which apparently it is, you tend to think that is true of all hams everywhere. But, it isn’t necessarily, and the CQ WW SSB results demonstrate that. Extrapolating local observations onto a global view can be inaccurate. 

Sorry for one more jeremiad to the list. I tried to keep it objective and verifiable. Most hams are honest, but among DX contesters it is not 99.99%.  - Duffey KK6MC

Hans - You wrote “It insults the community of hams, 99.99% of who play by the rules.”