Legally you are right any open freq is yours if you want it, this is where the gentlemans agreement comes in and respect for your fellow hams, or apparent lack there of comes into play

You really have to look up the rules for the contest and see what type of information they are scoring on. In some cases you wil here 5927 meaning 59 signal zone 27 and it could also be 59 and 27th contact. You can pick that pretty easily by listening to the chatter for a bit. In some cases they report the state, some the county, and in some cases they give the signal strength and a letter or number for the type of power they use so look it up on the internet and see what the rules say

Best way to handle it is record the contestor so you get his call sign, if he an American station, also record your attempt to inform him of his error. If he refuses to listen then you can send it to his field cordinator for the FCC with proof, will send him a notice. If it continues it can then go on up the chain. I agree that this is a problem, unfortunately this is the only way I know of to handle the situation. Guys we might as well sit back, tighten our seat belts and get ready for a bumpy ride because when the FCC goes no-code, the CB crowd is going to start trickling in.

I rebuilt and SB1000 amp and I added a variable capacitor of the type you would get out of an old table top radio, something like 4 to 365 pf or what ever they are. I put the cap from the common or switch arm of the filter network on the radio side, to ground.
The purpose for this is that after all the coils were tuned up I noticed a small amount of swr between the rig and the amp. This is a way of fine tuning any residule swr out and allows me full power on all bands across all bands. Works well.

I run an SB1000 amp in semi break in and at 5 wpm for the slow coders. I run an ICOM756 Pro II. If you look at the small knobs below the CRT on the radio, the furthest right button or the one next to it is a delay setting. That is where you adjust the drop out delay. I can send a word at 5 wpm and the sb1000 will drop out between words but the words do not drop out. at 8 or 10 wpm you can send the whole message without drop out even between words.

I have had problems with Norton, I use AVG7 for viruys protectiosn and windows anti spyware. I also use spybot but I don't let it auto run, I just use it about once a week to verify I am still clean. You should also be using a firewall. I have used Norton, again with problems, and many others. I settled on zonealarm. You can get a free version on line but I recommend the pro version which cost a little but has much more powerful options. I also use a cookie blocker from analog-x.com. all together I have not had a virus, or spyware in several years and I only have the cookies I want in my computer. It runs at a very nice speed. One other thing is learn about your "host file" located in windows\system32\drivers\etc. This is a real nice way of preventing anything from getting out if its gets in. Read about it, you'll see what I am talking about, its great.

I just obtained a B&W antenna from a friend who made it sound like the end all antenna needs for HF. I put it up just like they said for an inverted V, 40 feet center 20 feet on the sides and I got no where. I read reports that talked about burning resistors and such and one individual even said they put 8kw thru it w/o burning the resistors. They also said that there was a crystal matrix in the terminating section that B&W wouldn't tell you about. A flag went up there, as my first question was why are you running 8kw as an amateur.
I decided the antenna wasn't working that well let’s find out what’s inside so I took it apart. I figure if I know how its built then I can build another myself anyway. What I found six 3600 ohm resistors in parallel and they about 50 watts each so that would explain why the write ups were saying don’t run over 250 watts into them. The ballun was made from 6 bars of ferrous material with the appropriate wraps of wire to form a balun, the rest is just wire and pvc. I guess these antennas go for $290 and up. To me this is nothing more than a glorified terminated loop antenna certainly not worth the price.
I have been told the military uses a lot of these and they may or may not be true, I don’t know. If they do I can understand that as well, they are easy to put up and take down and will handle 250 watts, which should suffice on the battlefield. The design is not that bad and I am sure on 250 watts on a good day you can DX o it.
Over all I am not knocking the antenna at all other than to say it is over priced, in my opinion.
My question is this. It could be that I have an old version as again this antenna was given to me. Does anyone know of modifications the manufacture may have done to stop the terminating resistor from burning on high watt outputs.

I just obtained a B&W antenna from a friend who made it sound like the end all antenna needs for HF. I put it up just like they said for an inverted V, 40 feet center 20 feet on the sides and I got no where. I read reports that talked about burning resistors and such and one individual even said they put 8kw thru it w/o burning the resistors. They also said that there was a crystal matrix in the terminating section that B&W wouldn't tell you about. A flag went up there, as my first question was why are you running 8kw as an amateur.
I decided the antenna wasn't working that well let’s find out what’s inside so I took it apart. I figure if I know how its built then I can build another myself anyway. What I found six 3600 ohm resistors in parallel and they about 50 watts each so that would explain why the write ups were saying don’t run over 250 watts into them. The ballun was made from 6 bars of ferrous material with the appropriate wraps of wire to form a balun, the rest is just wire and pvc. I guess these antennas go for $290 and up. To me this is nothing more than a glorified terminated loop antenna certainly not worth the price.
I have been told the military uses a lot of these and they may or may not be true, I don’t know. If they do I can understand that as well, they are easy to put up and take down and will handle 250 watts, which should suffice on the battlefield. The design is not that bad and I am sure on 250 watts on a good day you can DX o it.
Over all I am not knocking the antenna at all other than to say it is over priced, in my opinion.
My question is this. It could be that I have an old version as again this antenna was given to me. Does anyone know of modifications the manufacture may have done to stop the terminating resistor from burning on high watt outputs.