The problem is when it's used to obtain the ---> AWARDS <---
As far as anything else - who cares what technology you use?
Oh, c'mon now, you write with great passion on this. You talk fairly constantly about the cheapening of the awards.
The fact is, nobody but you is all that keen on this supposed boundary between what is generally allowed and what is allowed for awards. There are and have been very few restrictions. Mostly, if it is in the FCC regs, you can do it.
But meanwhile, you have to face facts:
This cheapening has been going on for seventeen years.
The horse is not only out of the barn, his issue has issue by now.
Why don't YOU buck up and say all of it is OK for DX awards?
It should be quite evident by now that I think remote operation is just fine. I would have accepted, just for the sake of sheer compromise, some restrictions, but as AA6YQ points out, it is rather too late for that, something I myself didn't grasp until well into this my second or third thread on the topic.
For instance, a distance restriction of about a thousand miles would do a lot to avoid the most legitimate objection -- the dreaded "differential propagation" -- without making it to onerous for someone or some set of cooperative hams to find suitable land far out of town, where it is going to be cheaper. I would be personally OK with that (though AA6YQ's objection still has merit as some number of hams are still going to be badly hurt seventeen years on after they laid out a lot of money in good faith).
Such a rule would have had weird effects on RHR, too, which I don't care for one way or another, personally, but it would have allowed remoting to thrive.
I haven't though much about remote receivers yet, but in the end, I think their value is rather limited. So what if I can hear the DX on the east coast? I have a nice setup here and if I can't hear it on my own rig and antennas, hearing it on the east coast simply invites me to be an alligator station. So, I'm not terribly interested in that; the number of times I would make a QSO with a receiver in South Carolina (say) and my transmitter here in Arizona would seem to be negligible compared to the mischief I could cause. I don't care if it is or is not allowed. The
technology is not terribly attractive to me and I think it is self-limiting.
I'm not even sure having a remote receiver in, say, northern Arizona would be that big a difference maker. I'd want to have a transmitter there, too. If it was outhearing my transmitter, which has an excellent antenna attached (it's receiver is great, too) then I'd want the transmitter there, too.
In any case, I don't see any need to sell out. Unlike yourself, I'm not terribly interested in how other people get their awards -- you are. So it's you that needs to think about selling out. After all, this terrible state of affairs
is not recent.
For seventeen years, to varying degrees, all the evils you seem to worry about have been done by who knows how many hams. The ham apocolypse happened a long time ago. Your awards, perhaps unknown to you before, have been cheapened for most of your ham career unless you are very old in the hobby indeed.
But I've never felt my accomplishments "cheapened" by what others do, including those who actually cheat the written rules, not the supposed "unwritten ones" you and your friends now want to make official.
What they have on the wall satisfies them, I hope, including how they got it. But, it doesn't have to be my definition to make
me happy with mine. I know what I did and that's enough.