This IS something very interesting actually,
If you look at my rate graph, That Bump you see at 20:00Z?
That was a simple change of going from the typical ~30/35 WPM,
to only ~16/18 WPM.
It felt terrible at first, Kind of like when you get off the expressway
after driving 75 for 8 hours to go to a regular road at 60 feels like
you are crawling. But the QSO rate JUMPED a LOT!
Probably all those that can not copy the 30+ wpm. hmmmmm?
Joe W9ET/WB9SBD
Sig
The Original Rolling Ball Clock
Idle Tyme
Idle-Tyme.com
http://www.idle-tyme.com
On 11/9/2017 10:19 AM, Steve London wrote:
I have listened to recordings of SS from the 60's and 70's. What
strikes me is how much slower CW speeds were then. You needed to troll
in all of those newly-hatched General's, who could copy only slightly
more than 13 WPM. Obviously, this slowed the rate on Saturday, leaving
many more QSO's to be made on Sunday. If you tried running at 35 WPM,
you would quickly run out of QSO's.
Fast forward to today. With very few slow speed contesters out there,
we are working each other at 30-40 WPM, with high rates. No one left
to work on Sunday.
As a datapoint, the 1968 winner of SS CW was KV4FZ, with 1000 QSO's.
The QST writeup has some interesting photos - WA5LES (now K5RC), K5YAA
(still K5YAA !), WA5RTG (now K5GO), WA2CLQ (now K1ZM).
73,
Steve, N2IC
On 11/09/2017 08:18 AM, Bill via CQ-Contest wrote:
It has now been 10 years since the US went code-free and ham radio
license
numbers are at ALL TIME highs - 750K total, half are general and
extra that
have HF privileges. 30K new techs a year, 10K upgrades a year from
tech to
general/extra. The problem for CW contesting is the number of hams
that can
copy code at 20+ WPM is decreasing and will continue to do so. New
hams are
on SSB/FM/digital. Look at the FT8 band segments on a bandscope. Look
at the
QSO totals in the RTTY contests. Read QST. And MOST importantly look
at the
checks in the last SS.
Looking at the number of submitted logs for a contest doesn't
indicate how
the contest is doing, because it is now so easy to submit a log via
web page
copy and paste. A good indication is for all the ops that put in 22+
hours
last weekend to ask themselves if they HAD fun and if they look
forward to
putting in 22+ hours next year? Did they feel like they couldn't wait
for it
to end? Were they squirming in their chair the last few hours?
The only significant major contest scoring change I can think of in
the last
45 years is WPX getting rid of zero point Q's. That's when I started
entering
the WPX. There needs to be some changes in the SS for those of us
that still
operate CW contests. Only 54 stations reported on 3830 operating 24
hours. In
2010 there were 125 stations. I don't see anything positive in that
trend.
73, Bill KO7SS (47 years operating CWSS)
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