Topband: Rules vs. Ethics (was Brave New World)

[Michael Tope]

Larry, you hit upon a very important point regarding ethical lapses not 
being entirely victimless. Personally, I feel very strongly that when I 
send a QSL to someone it should indicate the state, county, and grid 
square where my station was located at the time of the contact. If my 
QSL or LOTW confirmation says I was in Los Angeles County, I better have 
been in Los Angeles County so that the recipient of my QSL has a valid 
confirmation of a QSO with Los Angeles County. I've done several 
portable operations and guest operator stints over the past ten years, 
and I have gone to great pains to make sure I provided accurate 
confirmations for those operations. This required creating different 
location signatures in LOTW and keeping track of which QSOs go with 
which locations. Same thing for physical QSLs. It would have been a lot 
less work to use the same QSL data for all my contacts, but that would 
have meant sending out QSL cards or LOTW confirmations with bogus 
location data. I thought about taking the easy road, but that would have 
really bothered me. I wouldn't want a county hunter to get a card from 
me that says Los Angeles County when in fact I was in Riverside County 
when I made the QSO. The same things applies to CQ Zone or State.

If someone is using a remote station, I think they have an ethical 
responsibility to provide confirmations which reflect the location of 
their transmitter at the time of the contact. If they want to use 
remotes all over the country to work their DXCC awards, that is there 
business, I don't really care. If on the other hand I got a card from a 
guy in Alabama that I needed for some award (e.g. 5BWAS) only to find 
out later that although he was physically located in Alabama, he was 
actually using a remote transmitter located in Utah when he worked me, I 
would be very upset.

BTW, full disclosure, I use an internet remote HF station. It has been a 
lot of fun building up the station and then remoting the equipment. It 
allows me to live in this horrible radio location shadowed by tall 
mountains but with a short commute to work while at the same time 
enjoying a decent radio QTH (flat terrain and room for antennas) without 
having to drive 2 hours round trip every time I want to use it. Of 
course, both my home QTH and the remote QTH are in the same county and 
grid square, so there are no worries about having multiple QSLs to keep 
track of.

73, Mike W4EF........

f someone wants to
On 2/26/2015 1:45 PM, Larry Burke wrote:
> Except it is not an ABUSE of the rules.  People feel that it is an abuse
> but it is fully sanctioned by the ARRL.
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> Jim stated as much in the note to which you are replying.
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> What is in play here is the difference between laws/rules and ethics. Just
> because something is "legal" does not make it ethical.  Adultery is not a
> crime in 29 states of the United States or most of the industrialized world.
> Is it therefore ethical? Is it ethical to click between remotes on the east
> and west coast because DXCC rules permit it? Throwing their hands up, the
> League is leaving the answer to the last question up to the individual
> operator. Why, if such operations are so ethically pure would one commercial
> remote business advertise "completely anonymous operation"? The very nature
> of the wording suggests their service is the ham radio version of the
> No-Tell Motel.
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> With regards to the "how I got my award shouldn't matter to anyone else",
> I'd argue that the operator on the "other end" of an unethical contact can
> be affected. There's a fair chance that he is pursuing an award as well. An
> operator in EU pursuing WAS (or VUCC on 6m) may work a W7 who is using a
> remote -- commercial or otherwise -- and does not indicate the location of
> the actual transmitter. The EU op goes away thinking he worked Oregon. Lo
> and behold the LoTW match or paper card shows up and "confirms" he did.
> There are a couple of west coast stations who routinely use east coast
> remotes to work EU on 6m and use their home state and grid square in the
> exchange. A savvy op on the "other end" can often tell if the exchange is
> legit, but there are strange spotlight openings on that band, just as there
> are on Topband. These ethical lapses are not entirely victimless.
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> Larry K5RK
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