Topband: Europrean SDR on 160M

[William Q Meeker]

It has been interesting to follow the remote receiver thread. I also 
found it interesting to play around with some of these sites.

Last summer, a good friend of mine, from another state, who is a top 
DXer related the following story to me in an email.

     "A ham in the western part of the US worked a rare European 
entity. The catch is that the European station was listening on a 
remote receiver (connected through the Internet) within a few hundred 
miles of the US station and similarly, the US station was listening 
on a remote receiver in Europe, less than a few hundred miles from 
the station that he worked. RF, in either direction, traveled no more 
than a few hundred miles.  Is this a valid DXCC contact? It seems 
that the DXCC rules do not preclude such a contact being valid for credit. "

A careful reading of the DXCC rules suggests some ambiguity. Note 
that rule 9 says "The location of any station shall be defined as the 
location of the transmitter." The following sentence in the rule does 
not add much clarity. I would think that most of us would agree that 
the rule should read something like "The location of any station 
shall be defined as the location of the transmitter and the receiver 
and the distance between the transmitter and the receiver should be 
no more than xx miles."

Last summer, I asked Bill Moore (NC1L) at the ARRL Awards Branch 
Manager if the above-described QSO would be a valid DXCC QSO. He told 
me about some others types of contacts using Internet communications 
that would not count, but did not address this one directly, when I 
asked specifically about it.

It seems to me (and a number of others that I have talked to) that 
there needs to be an explicit DXCC rule that says that for a DXCC 
contact to be valid, the transmitter and receiver, for both stations, 
must be within some relatively small distance of each other (perhaps 
50 to 75 miles). Policing the rule (an issue raised by Bill Moore) 
would be difficult or impossible, but that is beside the point.

Some of these kinds of issues (but not this specific one) were 
studied by the ARRL DXAC last year and their report is posted on the 
ARRL webpage. See

    http://www.arrl.org/announce/reports-2008/july/DXAC_Special_Report.pdf

I have not heard of any proposed actions coming out of this report. 
Perhaps others can enlighten us.

73,

Bill
K0KT




At 09:39 PM 12/29/2009, you wrote:

>From: Bill Tippett <btippett at alum.mit.edu>
>Precedence: list
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>To: topband at contesting.com
>Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:39:45 -0500
>Message-ID: <D6.B4.22148.6277A3B4 at lrcmmta08>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>Subject: Topband:  Europrean SDR on 160M
>Message: 5
>
>VO1HP:
>
> > Is this DXing ...definitely not BUT it can be done.  One wonders what the
>future will hold for us with the advent of these  technologies and
>applications.
>
>         Frank, if applied to working new ones for DXCC, this is 
> simply another (modern) way to cheat.  DXCC rules prohibit this in 
> Rule 9, but that won't stop some from doing it anyway.
>
>"9.   All stations must be contacted from the same DXCC entity. The 
>location of any station shall be defined as the location of the 
>transmitter. For the purposes of this award, remote operating points 
>must be located within the same DXCC entity as the transmitter and receiver."
>
>         Cheating has been going on since the Garden of Eden and it 
> will continue until the end of this world.  I believe most of us 
> know who does and who doesn't cheat, whether it's falsifying QSLs, 
> running illegal power, accepting "prompts" during "QSOs", Chat Room 
> / Internet QSOs or whatever.  ARRL has done a creditable job of 
> removing some cheaters but it's impossible to catch all.  I 
> personally have zero respect for anyone who does this.
>
>         Everyone must certify the following on each DXCC or 
> endorsement application:
>
>"I affirm that I have observed all DXCC rules as well as all
>governmental regulations established for Amateur Radio in my country."
>
>What this means to some is different than what it means to 
>others...as Bill Clinton once said, "It depends on what your 
>definition of 'is' is."  :-)
>
>                                         73,  Bill  W4ZV

William Q. Meeker
Department of Statistics
2109 Snedecor Hall
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa 50011
Phone: 515-294-5336
Fax: 515-294-4040
Home Fax: 515-232-1323
www.public.iastate.edu/~wqmeeker