On 1/4/2020 7:45 AM, Bob Shohet, KQ2M wrote:
I don’t know what rule changes K9YC is talking about. Perhaps he will
elaborate.
Bob,
Perhaps you (and others who don't understand) should operate SS as a
guest from W6. AND SS is not the only contest with RAC sections as
mults. There's ARRL 160, which the east coast views as a DX contest
working EU, and those of us west of the Rockies view as a NA contest,
where all the serious stations east of the Rockies are listening with
directional antennas pointing NE.
Contest rules are made by human beings, and the decision to use RAC and
ARRL sections is (was) an arbitrary one that may have made sense nearly
a century ago, but doesn't necessarily now. That decision is a contest
scoring rule, and it defines how participants will choose to operate. So
is the decision to make countries multipliers, and there are roughly 5x
more multipliers available to those operating in the Atlantic basin than
to those west of the Rockies.
To clarify what I'm talking about, I have a pretty good 160M antenna
farm, and do my best in 160M contests. Over the past six seasons, I've
heard seven signals from EU and been able to work two of those stations,
all during the last CQ160 and this season's Stew. I have learned that
it's a waste of time to call big stations east of the Mississippi river
before an hour after EU sunrise. This happens because of scoring rules
that make a QSO with a country outside W/VE worth five times more than
one to W/VE.
And W6 does NOT have an SS advantage working deep into eastern Canada --
NorCal, where I live, gets a pretty narrow window early Sunday morning
on 15M where I can work these section IF they are on the air then (and
IF there's prop on 15M, which there hasn't been much of out here for a
few years). And as others have noted, propagation from PNW, NorCal, and
SoCal/SW Az can be very different from each other, just as FL and
Mid-Atlantic are different from each other and from ME/Maratime VE.
I think that the difficulty in working DX, especially on 160M, has been
significantly impacted by increased noise levels on both ends of the
path. During the last solar minimum, EU wasn't easy by any stretch, but
over 3-4 years I'd worked a dozen or so EU countries on CW with the same
Beverages I'm still using. Now, I can only work EU with the 10 dB or so
advantage of FT8, and even then, VERY carefully and very ambitiously,
following the terminator at both ends of the path. Between this season
and last, I've added more than a dozen EU countries, most recently a
Russian station in Zone 17 at his sunrise. Until FT8, I had not worked
Zone 16; I now have five QSOs with Zones 16 and 17, in UR and UA.
73, Jim K9YC
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