Thursday 29 November 2012

Empty victory….



Yesterday I received the following wrinkled and wet item in the post. This was for taking part in the CQ WW CW contest in 2011.

I would have been over the moon if I had placed amongst the real contenders in Africa. This obviously was not the case. Very few of the stations that took part in the contest from Africa claimed to be in the assisted class. I cannot help, but wonder why so few contesters claim to be assisted? 

I cannot see why in this day and age anyone would not want to use the DX cluster. Could it possibly be that some are indeed using the cluster info, but submit their logs as un-assisted?

This renders this (my) certificate worthless in my humble opinion i.e. this effectivly means if I want to compete against the Real Mc-Coy, I need to take a step backwards and not use the cluster and that does not make any sense to me.

Maybe it is time to scrap the assisted and non-assisted classes; i.e. using the cluster should not alter the competitive class. Maybe there are too many classes already?

Hopefully, one day I will once again be awarded one of these sought after certificates again and will then  believe that it was awarded in recognition of good performance.


 Food for thought....

73, Pierre ZS6A





2 comments:

  1. Hello Pierre, I posted something related last year just like a few others. At that time the most popular N1MM contesting program made a cabrillio file with standard operating UN-ASSISTED. After our posts N1MM makes standard ASSISTED cabrillios now. But of course you need to update to the newest N1MM for that to happen. 73, Bas

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  2. Hi Bas,

    I was not aware of the shortcomiing in N1MM

    I use N1MM and my vertion has the correct options to choose from: ‘SINGLE-OP-ASSISTED’

    I guess one should not assume anything, but surely using the dx spotting cluster during the contests that allow it such as CQ WW is used by many if not most contesters?

    The way N1MM populates the bandspread with the stations and multipliers is a very nice feature.

    Very strange.....

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