It appears that a serious situation is brewing.

In order to confirm a QSO you need to be able to provide all 5 pieces of information which are callsign, date, time, band and mode. Currently the online call lookup services generally provide the band and mode once you enter a callsign, so there you have 3 pieces of information. The reason for leaving out the date and time is to reduce the number falsified QSO’s confirmations. (Cheating is a whole different topic).

The staff at CQ has decided to published the entire list of online logs for the the 2006 CQWW CW and SSB complete with all the QSO data.

The ARRL has long stated that if you are going to post online logs that it only contain a subset of the full log, they feel that this will maintain the integrity of the contact. While I agree that measure to keep the integrity of the QSO are necessary in a world with less than trustworthy people, this somewhat reminds me of a saying that we have in the information technology world of “security through obscurity”.

I am not siding with the ARRL or CQ at this point but the following questions exist:

Why the sudden desire to publish the entire log for the contests?
Should we evaluate the logging programs and the way the information is handled?
Will the ARRL start to ban the QSO’s from every contest that publishes full log data?
If the ARRL bans QSO’s publish in the CQWW results, how are they going to manage it, that will require a lot of man power.
If CQWW QSOs dont count for DXCC credit, and CQ continues to publish the full logs, this has the potential to put a whole new face on the contesting and DX playing fields. Is it really all that different from clubs that have split due to interest in contesting versus DXing? Has this once trivial dichotomy finally gone to a larger level?

Will contest participation reduce over time due to DX Chasers only working folks outside the contest window? If so, this could be dangerous for the contest itself. Over the last few years the CQWW participantion has seen a slight increase in participants (particularly CW!!!) but the growth has been in the single digit percent.

Your comments and the comments of CQ and ARRL are always welcome.

Paul K4UJ