On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:28:35 -0400, KC4UAI wrote:
I just had my first introduction to CW contesting during field day. I
sat and watched a CW operator rack up QSO after QSO at 25 wpm and I
was very impressed. Man, I wanted to do that! I left field day
with a renewed interest in CW thinking that I might try and brush off
the dust and cobwebs from my CW skills and give it a try next year.
Going from a copy speed of nearly zero to contest ready is going to be
a serious problem for me but I can try.

Then I see your post... Oh my. My first thought was "Wow! That would
be great on field day to speed up finding stations to work!" I could
even imagine that it would be pretty easy to automate most of the QSO
process and depend on the computer to find, work and log contacts with
little (if any) operator interaction required. This is, of course, at
the heart of the whole debate over this new tool’s use. Is it
fair
to
the operator who doesn't have this tool if I use it?

Please don't let this technology put pause to your desire to kick up your
manual CW skills!

Really, HF ham radio itself is an obsolete skill.

Not that that's a bad thing. There are still millions who build model
railroads (I'm sure there are more model passenger trains than real ones
these days!); who restore 1957 Chevys; there's a special season for
hunting with black powder rifles here in Tennessee.. and we've got plent
y
of Civil War re-enacters. People enjoy doing things their ancestors did.

Sending (and receiving) Morse is no different.

As a brief aside, in the current implementation, Skimmer does NOT replace
the human CW operator for most contests. Skimmer only copies calls. (an
d
whether a station is calling CQ or not) It doesn't copy the class - the
"2A" "3F" "2C" part. That said, I'm sure it would be trivially easy to
add this capacity if someone wanted it.

Also, in the current implementation, Skimmer is designed only to find
CQers to call. It really isn't useful for allowing you to call CQ & copy
those who respond. Only in QRP categories do you stand any chance of a
competitive score without extensive CQing.

How the CW contesters will deal with this new technology while keeping
the playing field level? Beats me, but thinking about it leads to a
number of possible solutions (Please folks let's add to this list.) 1.
Ignore the new technology and live with the fact that folks who use it
will likely increase their contest scores. 2. Regulate its use by
handicapping folks who choose to use such tools. 3. Make the use of suc
h
tools illegal for the contest.

And there has been a rather heated discussion of just this topic over on
the cq-contest reflector.

(I should emphasize, my comments below are with regard to a "local
Skimmer", where the Skimmer equipment complies with the existing 500m
circle rule - all equipment is within a circle of 500m diameter.
"Distributed Skimmer", where multiple Skimmers are connected over the
Internet, should make one a multioperator or "assisted" entry.)

Personally, at the root, I don't think Skimmer is anything radically new.

We've been allowing automation to take over various functions of our
operation for a long time.

Automatic Morse transmission dates back to the early 1980s. (for some
stations, much earlier)

It used to be important to know the difference between a VP5 and a VP6,
and the beam headings to their countries. Today, the computer will tell
you what country they're in; that the VP6 is worth more points than the
VP5; and which way to swing the beam to work either one. If you have the
right rotor controller you don't even have to swing the beam yourself.

Most operators are using a super-check-partial database, widely
distributed on the Internet. Hear "C4UA" & type it into the window, and
it automagically suggests you're listening to KC4UAI.

Yet automation is not perfect. The operator who trusts everything his
computer tells him is going to get screwed when he takes the
super-check-partial database's word for it & doesn't bother to copy the
rest of C4UA's call. He might just miss a double mult when the RAF issue
s
ZC4UA. The operator who passes up VE1XR/1 - the .cty file says it's just
Canada - may regret it when he learns the guy was portable on Sable Islan
d.

And Skimmer doesn't get it right all the time. It's pretty good (and wil
l
get better) but you really MUST verify what it's copying. Especially in
those contests that have an additional penalty for "busted calls".

Personally, I think to a large degree we *can* ignore this technology. I
t
is not so radically different from technologies we consider commonplace.
Maybe if we want to discourage it, the best method would be to increase
the penalty for busted calls. Say, for every incorrect call in the log,
the four subsequent valid QSOs are removed as a penalty. (and any
multipliers that those QSOs may have reflected)