Reflections on VK6ISL

[IK0ZCW]

VK6ISL was an IOTA expedition, directed at giving everyone an opportunity to chase a brand new island group, the last one to be activated in Australia. One contact was sufficient to claim it as a credit, but many stations transformed this event into an unofficial leaderboard contest. Consequently, the members of “Team Sandy” would like to express their disappointment with the very large number of stations who disregarded our specific requests to restrain their number of QSOs and particularly avoid CW and SSB contacts on the same band.

Instead, many stations made up to 11 QSOs with us on 7 bands, cluttering the pile-ups, leading to hundreds or even thousands of unnecessary contacts, thus indirectly preventing more individual stations to contact this IOTA reference, which won’t be likely back on the air for some time. Amazingly, our efforts in trying to overcome this situation by looking from time to time for new callsigns only has been criticized on the DX Cluster.

We are determined to prevent the repeat of a similar situation in the future. As such, we will analyse the benefits of establishing a limit for the total number of QSOs one station can have with the team, confirming a maximum of one contact for the bureau requests, proposing a cost increase for direct requests of multiple QSOs, etc.

Team Sandy,VK6ISL