Bill,
What you say is of course true. Note I never said a
word about giving up knobs, but since you brought up
planes, you might find a properly implemented joystick
may be a more ergonomic and less fatiguing way to run
a contest radio as well. Guess what, if you use
software you can model the interface, plug a joystick
in the USB port and find out. Why they even have
joysticks that give you tactile feedback. You could
program your joystick to tell you a given condition
has occurred. For example the feedback could tell you
your $50,000 5 element 80 meter beam that takes 3
minutes to rotate from east to west has finally
stopped rotating.
Sure you can spend a bunch of dough and buy an Alpha
that follows you around. And you can hard wire a
bunch of relay boxes that chooses the correct antenna
for you as well. But next week when you want to make
a change in that line up you are stuck rewiring all
those friggin relays. You can build a wall full of
4-1000's, one for each band and relays that follow you
around. Let's say 4-1000 #1 blows up in the middle of
the contest. If your relays are run by scripts
instead of hard wires you can rewrite the script and
re-designate 4-1000 #6 to fill in for #1 in a couple
of minutes. Losing 2 minutes in a contest as opposed
to 2 hours while you change out the amplifier may just
be the difference between winning and also ran.
Consider why you own an Orion. I presume you think it
gives you a clear advantage.
You can run a stack of mono-banders on a rotating
tower, but the guy with the StepIR has the advantage
of being able to switch front top back directions on
his antenna almost instantly, while your stack of
mono-banders and its tower is making the 75 second
trip around the horn. The step IR guy can write a
piece of software connected to lets say 8 virtual
compass points . Click a point and the software
algorithm will determine the most efficient way for
the antenna to get from point A to point B. If you
decide 12 compass points are more desirable add 50
lines of code and bingo you got 12. Now individually
maybe these things would not translate into higher
scores, but it?s like loss in an antenna system, if
you eliminate enough of it pretty soon you got a big
signal.
Thank you for outlining your side of the argument.
None the less it still amazes me that I worked DXCC on
80 in 0.07% of the time it took me 30 years ago. I'm
the same old crummy half brain dead op today I was
back then. So what is the difference? The
environment changed and a more efficient system
evolved.
73 W9OY
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