Ken Kreis, KA0W, <kia@netins.net>, in another chapter in the seemingly
endless saga of the supposedly speedy CW swishing Scout, says:
>The CW bands need more 30, 40 and 50 wpm blabbermouths. The more of those in
>the bands the less we will be plagued by the SSB garbage in the CW bands.
Which reminds me. During the SSB CQWW contest last weekend, I was
surprised to hear a lot of 40m SSB in the CW bands. Now, I understand that
outside of the Americas, the whole band is 7000-7100, with 7080-7100 the
traditional phone band. So during a major contest, something's got to
give. But I was hearing a fair amount of SSB below even 7040, from Europe,
Canada and South America. In fact I heard a number of U.S. "Big Gun"
contesters in the U.S. phone band soliciting (and getting) DX replies in
the Extra CW band. Is this a new thing, or did I just not notice it before?
All of which leads me to several (overlapping and contradictory) thoughts:
1. This is a dangerous precedent for the CW bands. If it's OK in one
contest, it will end up happening in others. It could be used by the
militantly anti-CW crowd as a wedge. Are the "gentleman's agreements"
breaking down?
2. Hey, it's a very big, popular worldwide contest. It only comes once a
year. Lighten up. Live and let live.
3. Aw, fapetessake, just fugghedaboudit and hit the WARC bands (Which I
did, when I got tired of trolling the contest for new countries :-) But
that doesn't work in the late evening when 40m is the only viable place to go.
4. This problem is just a reflection of the untenable situation of 40m
worldwide. Let's hope that one of these days WARC realigns the whole 40m
ham band down and the broadcasters up, so that all the hams of the world
have more space to talk to each other at night. Something like 6900-7200
for the hams, 7200 and up for the broadcasters. Or something similar,
where we at least break even or maybe gain some space. Let's hope it
happens before the next sunspot minimum.
What do other folks on the list think of all this? Since most of us use
our Ten Tecs for CW, it's sort of on topic...
If a realignment happens, most of us can play, I hope. A lot of Yaecomwood
synthesized rigs have a "cut the wire or diode" mod to enable xmit outside
the current ham bands. Some other rigs will tune lower than 7000
unmodified--my Omni VI tunes down to 6821 kHz. How about the older Ten-Tecs?
73 from KD7MW,
--- Peter
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