Talking about cheating I have been on several cruises. All of them have an afternoon trivia game. The game starts after everyone gets back from the shore excursion and before dinner. Teams are formed which are usually comprised of families and friends traveling together. The prize for winning is a plastic trophy with a plastic cruise ship on the top. Probably worth maybe $5.00. Believe it or not I have seem several teams cheating just to win a plastic cruise ship. So the fact amateurs would cheat to win awards is really that far fetched.
Quite frankly, I think you would have to be a special kind of stupid to go through all the bother of finding a way of cheating for an amateur radio contact award.
Don Miller made an art, a science, and a sport out of cheating in the Ham Radio world back in the day... You'd be surprised Dave W7UUU
A con-man, plain and simple. And yet there are those who treat him like an honored celebrity when he shows up at conventions. LoTW is so complex because of him. 73 de Jim, N2EY
W7UUU and N2EY have pointed out exactly why LOTW is the way that it is... In my post I alluded to this guy. I really didn't even want to use his name. He made the DX game a sham and made the ARRL so draconian about awards for DXCC.
Well, he wasn’t the only one (remember Romeo?), just the first to get caught big-time. Had he not had the chutzpah to file suit against the ARRL, which resulted in him being deposed under oath... I met him, briefly, once. This was at Hamvention, right after he was released from prison. He did give a short talk at the DX Forum, in which he admitted to everything and formally apologized to the Amateur community. And at the end of the talk, he mentioned that he and others had identified a “new” DXCC entity that no one had ever been aware of before, and he and the others would be activating it “soon.” Yeah, right. If you believe he was a con man... and many to this day do... then it sure sounded like a tease at one more last con. Haven’t heard a peep from him since.
Jim. This response isn't really to your post. I just had some things to say and picked yours because it was near the end of the list. In the past 30 days (since Dec 13, 2018) I have made 724 QSOs that were uploaded to LoTW. In that same period of time I have had 557 QSOs confirmed via LoTW. Many of confirmations were for QSOs made before Dec 13, but still, over 557 QSOs confirmed in that period of time. I have addressed no envelopes; made no trips to the post office; thrown out no expired IRC's; didn't write any checks; and the biggest effort made was clicking the left mouse button; total time expenditure was less than one minute. Also in the past 30 days I received a shipment cards from the 8th QSL Bureau. My log is all on PC and I can print my return QSLs by putting a stack of cards in my printer and clicking the print button in my log. I spent about 2 hours going through the cards, calling them up in the log, printing the QSL info on the cards that requested a return QSL; sorting the stack of printed cards by callsign perfix; weighing the stack to determine the size of the check to send to the Outgoing QSL Bureau ($15.00); packaging the cards; took to the post office and paid another $5.00 to ship them to the outgoing bureau. LoTW may not be fore everyone, but for me, it's about the best idea the ARRL every had. Your ham radio interests and operating will probably determine if using LoTW is something that you find useful. For relatively new comers to the hobby who are technically oriented in the first place, I highly recommend that you begin keeping a good PC log and start using LoTW as soon as you start operating on HF. If you stay in the hobby it's a sure thing that your interests will change over time. You might not be interested in chasing DX or awards right now, but in a life time of operating it's likely that you will at some point in time. Don't wait 30 years to learn that the FT5 you worked and didn't log wasn't France, it was Kerguelen Island. And now the paper QSL is not available, but their log was uploaded to LoTW, but you don't have a record of the date and time you worked them so the confirmation is now impossible. But no sweat, as soon as they raise another $200,000 there's bound to be another expedition in the next 15 years or so.
I read this thread the other day and decided to get LoTW set back up. My certificate had expired a while ago. I have a new computer in the shack so had not installed the software yet. It took me about 10 minutes to find the needed software and then to request the new cert. I got the cert the next day and it took me about 5 minutes to get it installed and LoTW working with HRD. I'm sure you've already heard it all here. (I didn't read the whole thread) You should just go ahead and renew if you haven't.
