A few random thoughts after last night's most-fun-ever Sprint.
I was surprised at how many stations sending big serial numbers haven't
mastered the CW format, causing confusion on their frequency more often
than not. Several in 2-land come to mind.
I think we need a convention for indicating the need for a fill,
particularly when you're the station leaving the frequency. People seem to
get more and more impatient about dumping their calls, and I anticipate
losing several QSOs because I never could attract the station's attention.
Normally I'd just wait for the next QSO and get any missing data there, but
sometimes one didn't happen. How about the standard error character (8
dits) as a way of attracting the sending station's atention through the
din? At least it doesn't sound like "T" or "NR", because most folks don't
wait past the first dash. Any other ideas?
This year, for the first time, I had a lot of trouble with RTTY stations
between 7035 and 7040. I hope this doesn't mean that the RTTY guys made a
point to be there during the sprint -- an intra-contester food fight is the
last thing we want right now.
Congratulations to G4BUO for what must be an all-time DX QSO record -- Dave
was everywhere!
73, Pete N4ZR
Sometimes a tower is
just a tower
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