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Re: [CQ-Contest] ARRL November SS is OK for the small station

To: rjairam@gmail.com, sawyered@earthlink.net
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] ARRL November SS is OK for the small station
From: steve.root@culligan4water.com
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:57:05 +0000
List-post: <mailto:cq-contest@contesting.com>
Ria, 

If you really want to become a good CW operator, then I might suggest you 
consider ragchewing. You really can't improve your CW skills in a contest, 
especially if you're using keyboard and macros to do all the heavy lifting. 
However if you're in the middle of a ragchew you have to be able to send 
manually and then copy whatever comes your way. I think you would be amazed at 
the number of contesters that aren't capable of holding up their end in a 
ragchew. However the best CW operators have no problem with it at all.

73 Steve K0SR

-----Original Message-----
From: rjairam@gmail.com [mailto:rjairam@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 12:18 PM
To: sawyered@earthlink.net
Cc: 'CQ-Contest Reflector'
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] ARRL November SS is OK for the small station

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 Iwill mess up and I can't 
realistically run SS on CW. I think thisscares off a lot of people. I can do a 
callsign copying contest likeARRL DX or CQWW just fine. I won't do as well as I 
do on SSB contestsbut I can place top 10 or near to it. I gather for many who 
aren'tbrought up in the CW tradition that they aren't really having a goodtime 
struggling to copyHowever, the solution to this is not to shorten the 
exchange.The solution is to get more people practicing copying SS 
typeexchanges. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but I havebegun to 
copy more of the ARRL code practice and others. This way myCW 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 upgradeby giving them 
more PHONE privileges. Techs have full CW privileges(at 200 watts) on General 
sub
 -bands on 80, 40, 15 meters. Why aren'twe encouraging more techs to try CW? 
The impression I get is that CWis treated as a hurdle, an obstacle, rather than 
a new fun mode totry.73Ria, N2RJOn Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:10 AM, Ed Sawyer  
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 cont
 est 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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