[UK-CONTEST] Contest UBN's

[Peter Burden]

Having returned to contesting (vhf/uhf only) about 9 months ago after a gap
of many years, I too find the topic of UBNs interesting. Clearly the
widespread use of computers has made log checking much easier even to the
extent of automatically e-mailing the "miscreants" with the details.

I'm strongly of the opinion that

(1) There should be no attempt to apportion blame. If attempts are made to
apportion blame the adjudicator's task becomes far more onerous especially
once there is an appeals mechanism in place.

(2) Following on, both operators should loose credit for the QSO. If the
UBN is detected comparing a check log with a competing operator's log then,
clearly, only the competing operator would loose credit.

(3) There should be no attempt to apply penalties any more than loss of the
points/multipliers for the QSO.

(4) Lost/error QSO statistics should be included in the published results.
I have seen this in recent DARC results - e.g.
http://www.darc.de/referate/ukw-funksport/iaru-r1-contest-2011/uhf-2011/

Under these circumstances we all know where we stand. If a station
consistently gives out incorrect information then he will loose a lot and
his QSO partners a little, if a station consistently mislogs incoming
information he will loose a lot and his QSO partners a little, so operators
with big problems will quickly feel motivated to sort things out.

I certainly wouldn't welcome a situation in which we felt we all had to
record the contest and then spend time crawling up the recording to check
every exchange in case it got posted as a UBN - or using the information to
correct one of our receiving errors. I know the latter is against the rules
and of course nobody would do that - would they?

73 Peter Burden G3UBX

PS - What does the abbreviation UBN stand for?