[UK-CONTEST] Contesting Ethics.

[brian coyne]

Some of you may not have seen the CQWW Committee decision to disqualify the entry from RA3CO for the CQWW SSB contest of last October, as reported in Radio-sport yesterday.
 
http://www.radio-sport.net
 
Many of us have concerns about the cavalier attitude of certain operators towards the rules and hopefully this will serve as a warning to others, and there are many others! 
 
At least this is one area which is easy to police, maybe Roger can advise us if there are plans afoot for introduction of a further rule that travelling operators, especially high scoring ones, may be requested to submit a copy of the operating licence.
 
I say bravo to the LU & HK amateurs, fed up with years of suspected abuse of their rules, who pursued the CQWW Committee to carry out an investigation. They also alerted the world via a thread on the Contesting .com pages entitled ' A Wake Up Call to Contest Organisers',  seemingly because they were frustrated due to cqww committee requiring info from the HK authorities rather than just requesting sight of a licence.
 
http://www.contesting.com/articles/955
 
It was only a few weeks ago that I came across that thread which had unfortunately died because it had deteriorated into an abusive dogfight. Nevertheless I was surprised to see champions of RA3CO crawl out from the woodwork to defend the indefensible, and also the complete lack of interest from the US hams in what was an important issue and I could not resist belatedly adding my own twopenneth.
 
What satisfaction is to be gained by cheating or bending rules, to take pleasure from seeing ones name in lights I just don't know. On the subject, whilst I was initially against 'Skimmer' I look forward to the development of spectrum recording from the main activity centres of the world to spot the cheats and also, maybe one day we can catch out those who use 'Skimmer' who do not enter the assisted categories.
 
As an aside, any big guns considering a major effort doing single band 40mtrs this weekend in the WPX test, take a look at the photograph on this page...
 
http://www.radio-sport.net/wpxcw09_pre.htm
 
..... if you had any ideas about No 1 place for EU you may wish to think about a different band. Where are we heading?, maybe a separate class for 'Super Stations' is not far away.
 
All the best,
 
Brian 5B4AIZ.