> Log a QSO when you send RR73 if you are reasonably confident it will be > copied.
I'm also active in FT4/FT8 contesting (https://ww-digi.com/scores.htm etc.), and have worked on design of a different (not yet active) FT4/FT8 contest for a different major sponsor. I feel that this guideline should be revised slightly. I'd like contest rules to add: "If you send RR73 or RRR to a station, and decode no further transmissions directed at you from that station, then a submitted log must include that on either a QSO or an X-QSO line. If adjudication concludes that you sent RR73 or RRR, but then decided to omit that QSO from your log, you will be disqualified for unsportsmanlike conduct." The intent of this rule is not to minimize the overall NIL rate, but to make logging entitlement more predictable. If Station B receives an RR73 or RRR from Station A, then Station B should always be entitled to log a QSO and be credited with its QSO points. This entitlement should not depend on Operator A's opinion of whether reception was likely. As far as I know, this has always been the case for similar QSO protocols, e,g., documents as old as https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/doc/wsjt/ state "If you have received RRRâ-âthat is, a definite acknowledgment of all of your informationâ- the QSO is complete." If Station A were allowed to log selectively (after sending RR73 or RRR), competition becomes less fair. A strong station can, in effect, push NILs into the results of many weaker stations by declining to log them unless the weak signal continues to be decodable for a 73. The strong station may be motivated to do this if the contest has a substantial NIL penalty, or if the strong station wishes to have a Golden Log. There has been an analogous CW situation. A well-known 160m CW contester once made an announcement that, after faintly copying a report from a caller, he would send "TU EE" instead of the usual TU+callsign. Unless the faint caller sent EE back, that caller would not be logged. My opinion is that the faint caller achieved logging entitlement upon receiving the TU. FT4/FT8 contesting is different enough from CW/SSB/RTTY contesting that having no NIL penalty is a correct design over the long term: 1. Adjudication is inherently easier. Thousands of stations around the world are storing every decoded FT4/FT8 message into an ALL.TXT file. Contest sponsors can accept voluntary ALL.TXT submissions from anyone, and use this crowdsourcing to automatically detect many types of fake QSO claims. By contrast, CW/SSB/RTTY adjudication is -- to some extent -- limited to matching one log against one (forward or reverse) log, or using humans for manual review of wideband decoding. 2. Survival of weak signals across multiple messages is, in some ways, inherently less likely for FT4/FT8. One reason is that FT4/FT8 have all-or-none decoding. Another reason is that new intense QRM often arises in the middle of an FT4/FT8 QSO, but less often in the middle of a CW/SSB/RTTY QSO (both because FT4/FT8 transmissions are sometimes longer, and because FT4/FT8 operators sometimes have great contention for a small set of usable transmit frequencies). To put this another way: the engineering of the FT4/FT8 decoders is superb enough that a weak station will intermittently be decoded with near 100% certainty, even if that station usually is not decodable. 3. Omitting the NIL penalty, and/or accepting that the NIL rate may be five percent forever, does not eliminate incentives for strategy improvements. Although (in my proposal) an operator must log a QSO after sending RR73 once, the operator will sometimes find it best to send RR73 multiple times. This can be based on understanding propagation conditions, knowing one's own transmitting effectiveness, or even past experiences with the receiving effectiveness of specific QSO partners. 4. There's nothing inherently wrong with a contest in which entrants often lack "full confidence that a QSO is complete and will be logged at both ends." Yes, it might be unsettling to know that you have a minuscule chance of a Golden Log even if you try very hard. However, it does add another strategy element. A successful entrant may need to keep track of QSOs where RR73 reception seemed iffy, and try to rework those stations later (stations are "in between" a dupe and a non-dupe). Matt, KA1R
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