I chase counties and we had a large group of SSB ops start to try CW.
They started slow, made lots of mistakes, but after time many of them
have gotten much much better. Would any of them call into to a station
sending 30 wpm plus. Nope. Would they if you were sending 15 to
20........Maybe if they were encouraged. There are lots of people
chasing all kinds of awards with counties or grids or states, etc that
would live to work you. They are just not going to be blown away at
high speed.
I don't thing forcing people to learn CW or operate that mode made much
impact on the CW bands in the past. I think they are more crowded today
than ever. It used to be you could work DX on RTTY and CW as there were
far less people to deal with. That is not the case anymore with either
mode.
We don't do a good job at nurturing new CW ops along. I am not even
sure the best way to nurture them other than education and trying to
slow down. I thing the Novice Roundup is gone as that was the one
contest a Novice or Tech could get into where they were target audience
and could get the taste of what contesting is and many more experienced
contesters would get on and hand out contacts. Is this something that
can be recaptured? Would it help?
W0MU
On 3/19/2018 11:33 AM, Bill via CQ-Contest wrote:
Lots of common sense in this post.
The main problem remains. CW is a dying art and the FCC put that concept in
high gear with no-code licenses. People no longer have to, and most don't want
to learn the code. It's as simple as that. If you compare the checks in your
logs you'll see lots of 2010-2017 for SSB but a much lower number for the CW.
Bill KH7XS/K4XS
-----Original Message-----
From: W0MU Mike Fatchett <w0mu@w0mu.com>
To: cq-contest <cq-contest@contesting.com>; cac-i <cac-i@reflector.arrl.org>
Sent: Mon, Mar 19, 2018 3:51 pm
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] NCJ Article RE: Sweepstakes Change Suggestions
I don't receive the NCJ so I have not read the article. What I gather is that
most people feel that the SSB part of the contest is ok but the CW part is not.
If most people feel that SSB fine the way it is, are people suggesting we make
sweeping changes to fix the CW portion and then possibly breaking both?The
exchange is long. It makes the contest different. This is good. As stated by
many we have plenty of rate contests where copying is not part of the contest.I
have heard of lots of ideas but none of them really address the issue which is
getting more people involved on the CW side. Their are plenty of people trying
CW or are proficient enough at slower speeds. Most of the ideas allow more
contacts from the same participants on other bands or by using other callsigns.
The reason the radio/callsign rules were put in place as I understand it,
that when the club competitions were fierce, I don't thing they are as much any
more, people would use other calls and onl
y work their club members. I get that. Good for them, but not good for the
overall health of the contest. I am sure people still do it, tough to catch.
SO2R changed much of contesting, tough to put it back in the black box.Is the
CW solution a simple as slowing down and encouraging new or less competent cw
ops to want to call you or is the goal to run at 45wpm and work nobody and
listen to endless CQ's? Will slowing down even help? Maybe the ARRL needs to
print some articles on encouraging people to try SS CW and explaining it
better?The last couple hours of SS can be pretty fun. Many people get on just
for that period.Who are we fixing the contest for? The top 50 or 100 that are
the real competitors or are we making it fun and better for all?What we could
be doing is breaking down the classes and putting the SO2 elite ops in one
category and then trying to figure out how to put the rest in appropriate
categories so we can do a better job at acknowledging them and
creating competition with similar stations and skills.NAQP is great for 12
hours. How would it be for 24 hours. I would suggest that it would get pretty
slow on CW. You can always milk SSB contacts on open bands. Maybe the NAQP
folks should give a 24 hour contest a try and see how it goes. NAQP has been
around a long time now if it was be so great, why has it never been
tried?Changing for the sake of change is not a good idea. Is the contest
really broke? I don't think so. Could it be improved? Maybe. Could we make
it worse? easily! Making large changes would change what the contest is. I
don't think that is a good
idea.W0MU_______________________________________________CQ-Contest mailing
listCQ-Contest@contesting.comhttp://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|