My take - I am not a very good CW operator by any means.
The long exchange at high speed is frightening to me. I am afraid I
will mess up and I can't realistically run SS on CW. I think this
scares off a lot of people. I can do a callsign copying contest like
ARRL DX or CQWW just fine. I won't do as well as I do on SSB contests
but I can place top 10 or near to it. I gather for many who aren't
brought up in the CW tradition that they aren't really having a good
time struggling to copy
However, the solution to this is not to shorten the exchange.
The solution is to get more people practicing copying SS type
exchanges. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but I have
begun to copy more of the ARRL code practice and others. This way my
CW can get better and I can then do serious effort SS.
How do we do this on a large scale?
Now we have the ARRL saying that techs need to be enticed to upgrade
by giving them more PHONE privileges. Techs have full CW privileges
(at 200 watts) on General sub-bands on 80, 40, 15 meters. Why aren't
we encouraging more techs to try CW? The impression I get is that CW
is treated as a hurdle, an obstacle, rather than a new fun mode to
try.
73
Ria, N2RJ
On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:10 AM, Ed Sawyer <sawyered@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Interesting data about log submissions for SS.
>
>
>
> CW logs received - 2008 (bottom of cycle) - 1417
>
>
>
> CW logs received - 2017 (just released) - 1275
>
>
>
> SSB logs received - 2008 - 1870
>
>
>
> SSB logs received - 2016 (latest available) - 1626
>
>
>
> Virtually every other major contest is growing - significantly - over the
> past 10 and 20 years. SS has been in decline steadily on CW for a decade
> (sunspots or not) and SSB was pretty steady until last year's 200 log drop.
> It will be interesting to see 2017.
>
>
>
> Likely, there are an increasing number of SSB casuals just working some
> activity that don't submit a log and very few on the CW side (my opinion).
>
>
>
> The CW problem seems terminal in my opinion for this contest only. No other
> HF contest has such a poor trend that I can find.
>
>
>
> SSB can probably stay interesting if enough casuals are willing to figure
> out the exchange.
>
>
>
> I don't see how changing the times does anything other than make some people
> frustrated - helping no one needing any help - and CW SS can hardly afford
> for any of the faithful to call it quits.
>
>
>
> 73
>
>
>
> Ed N1UR (no dog in this fight - just getting some data out there)
>
>
>
>
>
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