[UK-CONTEST] VU7LD and "Not In Log"

[Dave Cree]

My commiserations Alex,  very frustrating.

I don't know if the following was happening with VU7, but several times 
during  the current 1A4A operation I have heard a "pirate" working 
stations in the pile-up, as well as the genuine station. As those worked 
by the pirate then stop calling, they obviously do not realise they 
don't have a genuine contact. I know this has also happened to me whilst 
operating from overseas.  The pirates ape the genuine operator well, and 
at times are almost indistinguisable. On one occasion I went  QRT to go 
to work. When I arrived in the office and logged on to the cluster I 
found "I" was still running the pile-up!  Lots of not-in log notes 
written on returned QSL cards. All very sad, but becoming more and more 
frequent.

I think, however, there  may well be many frustrated operators after 
VU7, especially on RTTY where I think they were regularly mis-reading 
calls and not acknowledging (or listening to) attempted corrections. The 
lack of confimations of QSOs by some VU7 operators on RTTY before taking 
the next station also caused misgivings. Hopefully some band/mode gaps 
will be plugged by the next operation which appears to be promising 10 
MHz  activity also.

  73 es HNY, Dave