Man, all this griping about contest rules/formats again... hey, it's a contest
and wouldnt it be boring if they were all the same or even if they were all
"perfect"?
The VHF Sprints have their place and they are fine the way they are (except for
the 6 meter portion which needs to be moved off of Dayton weekend). If you dont
like 'em, you dont have to get on and work anybody, and you can always start
your own contest and do better :)
For those who think VHF contesting is just completely boring, I would suggest
it's just different. Yes, it's not the fast paced SS blast-away working 40 over
signals. Nope! It's a couple of 80 over signals blasting your front end, line
noise to eliminate (way worse than HF), then scraping the barrel for that next
grid that is in there one minute and faded the next. It's waiting all weekend
for a 1500 mile 2 meter opening that lasts 10 minutes, but jumping for joy when
you were savvy and alert enough to catch it and take it for all it was worth.
It's the art of passing QSO's and Mult's to other bands at it's absolute best!
Station RF design is much more complex than on HF done at the same level...it's
just on a smaller scale. It's Phone, CW, HSCW, and EME! It's tweaking the
antenna stack 5 degrees to peak up the next QSO while straining the limits of
your ESP to dig out a callsign that you should recognize as a regular VHFer.
Somehow it doesnt sound all that boring to me!
It's all what you make of it. VHF is every bit as challenging as an operator
and certainly more as a station designer than HF.
73, Ty K3MM (2m op at K3MQH among other things...)
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