Hi Drew,
I'm really happy to see your reply. I was in the middle of typing one
when I saw yours, which articulates everything that NAQP and the Stew
Perry are all about! And yes, it was an eye-opener when I figured out
that I could create my own bandmap in N1MM without the help of a cluster
or Skimmer.
BTW -- learning to operate with low power and/or lousy antennas is
another very important learned skill. You have to learn how to operate
when you're weak, how to play propagation, which stations are likely to
respond, not linger when they don't, how to time your call, come back
when they're not busy.
When I bother to work major DX contests, I do it QRP to challenge myself
and my antennas. Thanks to their badly skewed scoring rules, the only
major international contests I work are the WPX events, where stations
who aren't around the Atlantic basin are competitive.
73, Jim K9YC
On 8/8/2021 12:39 PM, Drew Vonada-Smith wrote:
I am glad that there are still a few of these around, just like Stew Perry.
There are certainly plenty which include assistance. Low power and no
assistance is what makes this contest different, and for me, fun.
"Without assistance, operating becomes a deadly boring sequence of tune, copy, type
the call in, be told it's a dupe, and repeat."
That sentence really surprised me. What one describes as boring is to me a
core skill of contesting. Doing this quickly*IS* contesting to me,
particularly in most of my years with much smaller stations. And it is still
easier unassisted with modern logging tools, because one can maintain a
bandmap. (I've been surprised to find how many folks don't do this.)
I really hope we don't make all contests the same in these regards
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