[UK-CONTEST] GI1W claimed score ?

[Dominic M0BLF]

Hi Chris (and the rest of the list),

>On a separate issue, I was amazed to read a posting recently from a UK
>contest station along the lines of 'our mult station could not function
>properly because the DX Cluster link was down' ..mmm.... I don't want

No offence taken, but I wrote those comments, so perhaps I ought to clarify 
what I meant.

As you are no doubt aware, contesting is becoming an increasingly high-tech 
business and I believe that's how it should be: computer/radio integration 
is one of the few areas where amateur radio can at least make a pretence of 
staying up-to-date with the latest technology.

There's a fair chance that almost every serious contest station you hear 
today is running WriteLog for logging and one of the reasons is probably the 
way that the DX Cluster is handled by the program: spots coming in from the 
cluster are displayed on a bandmap and colour-coded according to whether 
they are a new mult or not.  It is then just a matter of clicking on the 
spot or callsign in the bandmap and the rig automatically retunes to that 
frequency and mode, often with the appropriate split if necessary, so all 
you have to do is give your callsign and hopefully make the QSO.

I'm sure there is nothing new to you in what I've just said but my 
implication was not that this point-and-click method replaces searching the 
band (far from it, as we did pick up some mults that hadn't yet been spotted 
that way).  Instead, I was trying to say that when the source of all that 
information is cut for a substantial portion of the contest you do feel very 
uncompetitive.  Our (M4A's) logs also prove that our QSO levels on the mult 
station did drop quite considerably once the Cluster access had been lost. 
But maybe that's also because we were a very young team too, so most of us 
have learnt contesting with the point-and-click convenience...

73,

Dominic M0BLF.

From: Dominic Smith
MPhil postgraduate student in Corpus Linguistics,
University of Birmingham.

http://www.domsmith.co.uk/m0blf