[UK-CONTEST] IARU Contest: Level playing-field?

[Dave Sergeant]

On 17 Jul 2006 at 18:22, G3SXW wrote:

> Finally, here is data directly from DL6FBL.
> While operating PT5P with DL2CC in WRTC they made 150
> Unique QSOs out of a log of 2,000 QSOs (7.5% of their log,
> many times more than almost all other WRTC Teams).
> One-half, 75, were with DL. One half of these (37 QSOs)
> were provided by one station, using ten different
> call-signs (one-quarter of all their Uniques). None of
> those ten calls appears in any other WRTC log.
> Ben seems to be proud of this performance. Hmm.

I don't want to get into yet another ethical argument on this 
reflector...

I suspect most of us have been guilty of minor infringement of 
contest rules. For instance I have sometimes worked a local station 
here on several bands as a result of idle chatting on the club vhf 
net frequency. Some of these QSOs were followed by ones with his XYL 
who I am not sure was in the shack at the time... But they are 
genuine QSOs which really did take place. And 'uniques' are pretty 
commonplace, another of our club members will give me a call when he 
hears me in the contest but won't them go on and work any other 
stations, and with no prior arrangement at all. Nothing fishy there.

What has not been mentioned in the case of PT5P who do seem to have 
take this a bit further than most, is that under the rules of WRTC 
the operators/nationality of individual stations is not publicised 
until after the event. Even the on line score board gave no 
indication of what call a particular operator team was using. If this 
huge number of arranged uniques did in fact take place it indicates 
that the WRTC call of the Germans was made widely public somehow, and 
not just to a random small number of amateurs who managed to work it 
out from accents etc. Of course the adjudicators noticed the 
discrepancy and adjusted logs accordingly, apparently removing 
uniques from all the other teams which is probably a bit unfair.

But changing the rules to remove own country QSOs is certainly not 
the answer. Different contests with different rules mean that some 
are bound to favour certain parts of the world, fact of life.

73 Dave G3YMC

http://www.davesergeant.com