Should self spotting be banned?

This week, after some difficulties with DXMaps, I switched to DX Heat for my occasional cluster service.

DX Heat is very good, not least because spots appear immediately and reliably, unlike some others.

The only trouble is, DX Heat won't allow the occasional self-spot.

No announcing yourself!  Image: Wikicommons/Sn1Per.

But why would I want to self spot?  Isn't it cheating? 

Other than breaching the relatively few strict and legally-enforceable licence conditions, there is little one can do as an operator that amounts to something that is, in law, wrong.

So these traditions, such as not self spotting, are merely that - ways of doing things that have come to be accepted by the majority as 'not the done thing'. 

The only thing that is meant to be 'wrong', as of tradition, is that you should not announce to others, by means other than radio, that you are present on air.

Having established that self spotting is not a legal wrong, and that it relates only to not announcing your own presence by non-radio means, let's look at a few other situations relevant to amateur radio where we could use the same logic as is used to frown at self spotting, but that leads to no sense at all.

(1) A scheduled contact - a 'sked'.  This has been a feature of amateur radio since its very inception.  Marconi used a sked to test whether radio could travel across the Atlantic in 1901. By its very nature, a sked is usually arranged by a method other than radio alone.  E-mail, letters, word-of-mouth, prior knowledge and telephones have all featured as means of facilitating a QSO, by making known to others when you will be active on air by means other than radio, so avoiding wasting time, waiting for a chance contact.

This would be 'wrong', according to the logic of prohibiting self spotting.

(2) Announcing in the amateur radio press or web sites that there will be a DXpedition to some far-flung place.  This alerts others to their presence by a means other than radio.

This would be 'wrong', according to the logic of prohibiting self spotting.

(3) You send a spot of hearing or having a QSO with someone else to the online cluster.  This announces to others of the station's presence (including your own, which is often used as a back-door method of self spotting) to others, and via a means other than radio.

This would be 'wrong', according to the logic of prohibiting self spotting.

(4)  You publish your grid square/WAB square/IOTA/ITU region etc. on your QRZ.com page, which is making these details known by a means other than radio.  Correctly receiving these details by radio is usually a fairly strict requirement for award and contest claims (and most digital modes send them out at CQ by default).  Yet, they are published as standard by just about every operator that uses the internet.  Who hasn't been in the situation where you heard the station's callsign clearly, and even had a good QSO, but forgot to request the grid and then looked it up online?  Is that cheating?  According to the rules, yes.  According to common sense and people reasonably using information available to them, no.

On the less active or just-about-opening bands, there is, by definition, little activity.  People will gladly flock there if someone sends a report that the band is open, or a spot of a station heard calling, or even having made a QSO.

So, rather than calling into the void, waiting for the herd mentality to kick-in, it's often a good idea to send a self spot.  That way, it's more like a sked, where people know you are calling (announcing by some method other than radio), and listen in to make a proper, legitimate QSO using only radio and without having to sit around all day, just in case.

I humbly suggest that those who seek to prohibit self spotting ask themselves: how does it really differ from any of the four points identified above? Is it not actually simply a case of old traditions having failed to keep up with developments over the post-internet years, now some 30 years in age?