[VHFcontesting] VHF contesting ethics questions

[Duane - N9DG]

--- On Wed, 6/18/08, John AA5JG <aa5jg at lcisp.com> wrote:
> 
> But 70 years ago you listened to the band yourself and
> tuned the radio yourself finding the stations to work.
> There were no computers involved. It was just you and your
> equipment. If I understand it correctly, doesn't CW
> skimmer tune the band for you, decode the CW, and print it
> out on the screen by station and frequency?  We may have
> done that with paper and pencil 70 years ago, but the
> tuning and decoding was done by the operator, not by the
> computer.
> 
> 73s John AA5JG 

But 70 years ago you *did* use some kind of *technology*, be it a cat whisker diode detector, TRF, regenerative detector, or even some new fangled triode detector/super heterodyne. But what you didn't do is extract information about who was on the bands by sticking each of the leads of the 600 ohm ladder line in each ear ;).

Bottom line technology has always been a core part of ham radio. And today computers are just another piece of technology that can be used. Just like the new fangled superhet was in its day. So despite the signals ultimately being *audible* it was still *technology* that actually enabled you to know that the signals were there or not. And I doubt that there were many telephone based spotting networks back in the 1930's either.  

But what many of the anti computer in ham radio crowd try to do equate "computers integrated radio" as being the same thing as "Internet with radio". They are by no means the same thing at all.

I believe the real crux of the debate should be centered on whether the use of other parallel means of information to find, or make the contact is permissible or not. Not whether computers are permissible or not.

This whole issue is really reaching a fever pitch today because of cheap common carrier communications. The Internet being a good example of such.

What ham radio cannot afford to do is to arbitrarily pick some technology plateau, or some technological place in time as the benchmark or definition of ham radio. That is completely counter to its very purpose and I'm convinced will surely lead to its demise in short order.

Duane
N9DG