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The cheating charges were first leveled by Yuri Onipko VE3DZ, who operated again this year as 8P3A, registering one of the top DX scores.
But his effort wasn't close to that of Valery Komarov RD3A, who used his first contest trip to the Carribean to smash the Single Operator DX record in an operation at PJ4A.
And that drew the ire of Onipko on the 3830 scores reflector, as he wrote "when I see scores like the one from PJ4A, I have the feeling that it's time to quit serious contesting."
"I might put my contesting activity on hold for a while, because I see absolutely no sense in competing in situation like this," VE3DZ added.
While Onipko did not make any specific charge, his verbal slap at RD3A was quickly was echoed by contest legend Jim Neiger N6TJ, who has previously pushed for close cheating checks of the Russian's big contest scores.
"Welcome to the club, Yuri," Neiger said on the CQ-Contest reflector.
"When the claimed Top A/B single operator score posted defies any reasonable imagination of reality, like beating a 9-man multi-multi from Hawaii, then I guess we all can go back to playing chess - where it's pretty hard to cheat," Neiger wrote.
Once again though, no one would offer any specifics on why Komarov's score was the result of cheating, a familiar refrain to radio-sport.net, which receives numerous emails charging RD3A and others with illegal operations, but nothing concrete to back it up.
Critics of RD3A often charge he uses backup operators to help his CW contest efforts.
Russian contesters contacted by radio-sport.net were especially reluctant to offer opinions on Komarov, worried about retaliation by their colleague, who has made his money in the oil business.
Meanwhile, a separate dustup erupted over bogus spots in the contest that targeted a number of top DX stations, which were attributed to the call VE7FKM - a call that is not issued by Canadian authorities.
The spots caused a flurry of dupes for Onipko and others on the DX side, and were reportedly traced to a US contester in Arizona.
"I traced the guy and 99% sure that's him," Onipko told radio-sport.net, who added that he "denies everything."
Onipko refused to publicly reveal the call of the contester in question, "since there is still 1% of doubt remains."
At the ARRL, Contest Manager Sean Kutzko KX9X was watching the traffic on the reflectors, but reserving judgment on any of the matters.
"All logs undergo the same level of scrutiny during adjudication," Kutzko told radio-sport.net. "If the log-checking process notices an anomaly, we dig a little deeper to see why."
"Activity on the RBN was very high, over 1.6 million spots over the two days, nearly as many as during the CQWW CW last fall," said Pete Smith N4ZR, one of the RBN team members.
"Since that's a significantly bigger contest, I attribute this to the increasing interest by hams around the world in contributing spots to the RBN," Smith told radio-sport.net.
One of the improvements that Smith was testing behind the scenes on the weekend of ARRL CW was a new piece of software that can help the Skimmer avoid "busted" spots that incorrectly list the call sign of the station calling CQ.
"What (it) does is check whether several RBN stations spot a given station on a given frequency within a 10 minute time-span; if a bust is only spotted once, or if it comes only from one station, then it is dropped," Smith explained.
"I haven't looked at all the data yet, but my subjective impression is that this filter did a superb job of filtering out the junk while letting good stuff through."
Smith said while the main RBN server did well in ARRL CW, his group is still looking to bolster the software and hardware behind the RBN "in anticipation of further growth."
"One pie-in-the-sky notion, for now, is collecting not only CQ spots, but also those of stations S&Ping. A complete database of *all* identified activity on all bands would be an intriguing resource for contest sponsors," Smith added.
