Thank you for your replies.
Lets see if I can summarize the comments.
(1) Apparently because of N4NYY´s comment, rule 9 applies since he was declined a contact with VI since this station was illegal
(2) KD8MJR raises the obvious question, what is legal and what is illegal
(3) In my opinion, legal means that the station is operating and transmitting from the same DXCC country, not in the same location (ie Transmitter is in the city and the operator is in a beach house but in the same country.) Illegal would mean that the transmitter was in VI and the operator was in California.
(4) The question now is, how do you know if he is illegal? There are no means to find out this if the operator does not indicate this, so, somebody had to report that he was not in VI
(5) This raises another question, should the operator instruct that he is operating a remote station from a DXCC country but he is not there and warn that that contact is not good for DXCC or any other award?
(6) This is an ethics question, and lacking that, it is quite probable that many not so rare countries could be operated remotely illegaly and unfortunate hams applying for awards with invalid contacts.
(7) Then if the award manager does not know if that remote operation is illegal he would count it as valid.
(
As can be seen, this is a viscious circle that never ends, maybe this is not regulated not because somebody forgot, maybe this cannot be regulated.
(9) Maybe the only feasible solution is to count on operator ethics and also on hams reporting such illegal operations when detected.
Food for thought, we have the technology to setup a remote station anywhere in the world and operate it remotely from a comfortable chair at our house. For very rare countries this would be very difficult because proof of license and actually being there is required to validate the dxpedition, but for a not so rare entity, we could be working and counting as valid when this is not the case.
