Hi,
I've been following the FT contest high NIL rate discussion. It affects me as
I've never done an FT contest with less than a 5% error rate compared to a more
normal 1-2% rate in CW, SSB and RTTY contests. In my first FT8 contest, the
2018 FT8-Roundup, I had a 9.4% score reduction.
I took part in the recent FT4-DX-CONTEST partly to take a look at the problem.
Some thoughts:
Consider my usual plight as a mostly S&P contestant. At the end of a QSO with
a running station, I send an RR73 transmission.
WX6XXX AB1J RR73
After that, I don't want any dead air time.
I want the runner to immediately send something to someone. It can be a 73 to
me, a new CQ or a reply to a tail ending station (calling off frequency,
hopefully). It's his or her transmission frame. Use it.
WX6XXX AB1J RR73AB1J WX6XXX 73 or CQ RU WX6XXX CM87 or TU; WX6YYY
WX6XXX R 599 CA
What I don't want is for the station to disappear for a while.
In the FT4 contest, the running station often disappeared for one or more
cycles, so I didn't know what was happening after my QSO. If I saw an
immediate transmission, all was well. If signals were good and there was no
QRM, I assumed all was well. Otherwise, who knows?
What I want is what happens normally with the legacy modes, CW, SSB, RTTY.
With those modes the running station doesn't disappear between QSOs or get out
of the flow. His continuous ongoing operation is confirmation that my QSO was
good; otherwise he'd ask for a repeat. He should never go silent. If he
does, something went wrong (power failure) or he's stuck in an SO2R quagmire.
(That's the reason folks hate to wait for a slow SO2R station - what happened?)
FT logging should not be done automatically. Set WSJT-X to prompt logging, but
manually click to log the contact when the QSO is satisfactorily completed.
This will prevent logging a contact prematurely or logging it multiple times
(one for every RR73) when repeats happen.
There are lots of new FT contesters who don't know the legacy mode contest
conventions, such as implied good QSOs if no one raises any issues during the
QSO (no repeat requests) and the running station continues on his merry way.
They will need to learn the convention and realize they don't need a final 73
if some other transmission is sufficient.
73,Ken, AB1J.
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