DXBrasil.net

In this week's radio-sport.net newsletter, there is an excellent article on the current deliberations about how to handle CW Skimmer in contest rules (http://www.radio-sport.net/skimmer1.htm). According to the article, ARRL and CQ rule-makers are in contact, and are leaning toward putting Skimmer in the Assisted category.

I can appreciate their dilemma, but hope that they will think carefully about this. I am posting this here because I don't know who to write, specifically, but I know it is likely they will read it here.

Take Sweepstakes and CQWW as examples. The most prestigious category, by far, is single-op unassisted. If CW Skimmer is banned in this category, the temptation to cheat will be almost overwhelming. In SS, 50 additional QSOs over the last 12 hours can make the difference between finishing fifth or first. In CQWW, an extra 75-100 multipliers would be a similarly huge advantage.

The problem is that it will be almost impossible to detect a decisive level of cheating. The statistical methods used to detect packet cheaters simply won't work.

In SS, I would use Skimmer to fill the bandmaps (in my contest logger) for all the bands that are open at my QTH. Then I would choose the one with the most activity, and go either from the bottom down or the top up, working the stations on the bandmap with my second radio. The pattern of operation this would produce, for any log-based analysis, would be indistinguishable from what a good unassisted single-op would do.

CQWW would be a little trickier, because of the importance of multipliers. A covert Skimmer user would have to be careful not to be too quick to grab multipliers as soon as they are first skimmed, particularly if it produces a pattern of band changes versus new mults that will show a "supernatural" ability to know when a new mult shows up on a given band. Again, the secret would probably be to change to a given band and
work your way up or down the bandmap in a way that mimics how a non-Skimmer op would do it.

I can hear some people reacting now - "Ooooh, he's telling people how to cheat." C'mon, guys, I'm not the sharpest blade in the drawer, and certainly not the most accomplished, motivated or ingenious contester. Anything I can think of is probably being mulled over by others right now, as we wait for the rule-makers' decision(s). I just hope they won't make a decision that makes the cheating problem worse.

73, Pete N4ZR