[UK-CONTEST] Contest Signal Quality

[Olof Lundberg]

Clive,
I spent quite a few hours on the air over the weekend and I found fewer
horrible signals than ever on the bands. Back in the 1960's when I was
fairly active in contests the quality/purity of cw signals was much worse
than today. Having said that I still agree with you. Contest sponsors have a
responsibility in terms of maintaining and improving the standards in the
hobby. As you say, with SDRs and recording it is easy to get absolute proof
of signal quality. These SDRs are high-quality measurement tools. A basic
generous occupied bandwidth profile should be agreed, culprits exceeding
that should be warned and, if the offense is repeated, be DQ'd.
I have actually more of an issue with rogue behaviour in general. Doing most
of my occasional contesting from a qth with LP and thin invisible strings in
the shrubs I do a lot of listening and S&P. It is obvious to me that the QRO
guys generally and some more than others are just taking it for granted that
they can run over whatever there is on a frequency they want to use. A
modern variant of that is cluster/skimmer spots where the QRO folks just
jump in without any listening at all, taking for granted 1) that the spot is
correct and 2) that they are so loud that they will dominate.
There is not a simple solution to this but again I think that contest
sponsors/organizers have an important responsibility. The problem is that
there are cultural and soft behavioural issues involved and it would be
difficult to write tight rules for that. Here is a suggestion though: what
if contest sponsors invited comments/critique on operator standards and
issued 1) fair-play awards to ops that get plenty of consistently good
reviews and 2) warnings (or hints/suggestions) to those ops that are
behaving badly? A requirement for a fair-play award would be widely
dispersed support and similarly (but opposite) for the bad guy warning?

73 de Olof G0CKV

-----Original Message-----
From: uk-contest-bounces at contesting.com
[mailto:uk-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Clive GM3POI
Sent: 21 February 2012 13:31
To: UK-Contest at contesting.com
Subject: [UK-CONTEST] Contest Signal Quality

OK seeing I started the subject up in my last e-mail I'll kick off with some
of my initial thoughts. 
1.  The culprits producing wider than considered reasonable signals  know
fully what they are doing in order to drive down the scores of other
competitors.  
2. Contest organisers should include a catch all type rule about signal
quality, which they could then act on, without one FA can be done.
3. SDR receivers would provide any evidence of poor signals together with
recordings.
4. There can be no justification for a wide signal in a substantially narrow
band mode.
73 Clive GM3POI