Tim, as one who has done extensive operating in both SOAB and SOAB(A), there
are different strategies involved in how to operate and entering into the (A)
category requires you to adjust your mind somewhat. (A) is easier in many
respects because you don't mentally feel that you miss things - be it a
multiplier that shows up or an opening because the sheet volume of spots
virtually guarantees you that you will know about openings when they happen. I
am not talking about oddball openings at 0800z on 20 meters, but more like the
openings that you anticipate happening on 10 meters or the occasional e-skip
opening on 10 meters.
That being said, entering into the (A) category often means your getting ready
to enter into a duel amongst 20 well-armed battleships. Are you ready for a
massive packet pile? Do you think you can bust a packet pile? Are you willing
to lose a run frequency for a packet pile? Well armed (those with lots of
antennas and a kilowatt) stations can answer yes to these and will take on most
any pile that they come across. For low power assisted stations, you're going
to have to (most likely) wait for the dust to settle and let the K3LRs, NY4As,
K3WWs, NQ4Is, and K1LZs take their chunk of meat before you are more likely to
be heard.
73 Rich NN3W
On 01/28/13, Tim Shoppa wrote:
> No one who is casual about operating really cares what category they are put
> into; but putting even casual assisted single ops in with multi-ops makes no
> sense.
I operate some contests with reversebeacon assistance and others
non-assisted. Mostly... if I have a chance of picking up new DXCC
credit I will enter assisted. What this means is that I enter very few
domestic contests assisted.
I myself don't mind being put in the multi-ops even though I was a single op.
I actually find it fascinating, that in the DX tests, the top assisted
LP scores are still well below the top unassisted LP scores. I suspect
that few of us entering in the assisted categories, are using it
effectively. I know that I've been using reversebeacon spots for
years, but only in the past few months do I feel that it is actually
helping my score, and that's mostly because of rate-watching
discipline that I have built up by entering the ARRL sweepstakes and
the CW sprints unassisted. Just because spots fill your bandmap
automatically, does not mean that it automatically increases your
score.
If you make a scatter plot of 3830 scores, with the X-axis being
number of QSO's and the Y-axis being number of mults, you can see that
FOR THE SAME NUMBER OF QSO's, the number of MULTS is obviously higher
for most assisted stations than for most unassisted stations. But the
real question is... does that mean (holding other things equal) that
the assisted have more mults, or fewer QSO's? I suspect that except
for the most-disciplined assisted ops, it means fewer QSO's, and that
few LP assisted ops are disciplined enough to know how to optimize
their score. I think this generalization is only beginning to break
down.
Tim N3QE
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