On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:32:46 -0400, N2EY wrote:
There can be. Here are a couple of "lines of purity":

1) Full automation, such as was fictionally depicted in "The Man Who
Broke The Bank", is when no operator intervention is needed. to make a
QSO. The operator may sit there and watch the system run, and
interrupt it if s/he wants, but if the machine doesn't *need* any
operator intervention, there's an objective line.

While not yet a reality AFAIK, it seems to me that building such a
station for the various RTTY modes is not beyond the realm of
possibility with current methods.

It has in fact been done, for CW. N6TR did it some years ago - I want to
say 1985!

I think he only used it once. Tree enjoys winning contests; even today,
automation technology is not up to that.

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A dilemna here, and with many other current issues in contesting, is
"category creep". Should SO2R entries have their own category? Should
there be separate categories for "low-power and dipoles" and for
"low-power and beams"? In some contests, a significant majority of
entrants win, because there's pretty much a category for everyone!

So I think we have to ask: if we're going to split Skimmer users into
a separate category, do we need to get rid of a category distinction
somewhere else?