My first ARRL Phone SS was 1958. Back then you exchanged a traffic heading
that took almost a minute . You had to choose between CW and Phone (I mean
AM phone not SSB) and the SS ran over two weekends where you worked a max of
40 hours out of 73.
Somehow I made 821 valid QSOs in 37 or 38 hours.
If you wanted to win you ran low power (150 or less INPUT). On CW the
multiplier was 1.25 and on phone it was 1.5.
I remember Vic Clark working 20 WPM CW on Sunday afternoon and somehow he
had a distinctive sound to his signal.
ARRL did change the rules due to HQ perception and member complaints. The
member complaints cut the CW and phone into separate weekends so the entire
band(s) were not full of SS stations. Even then HQ realized stations in the
NE USA were having a hard time competing so the cut the operating time down
to finally 24 hours on each mode.
Plus in 1962 W5UN was approaching 300K on CW and two phone stations were
right behind so the rules were changed so contestants could not approach
300K.
Boy were they surprised in a few years.
In addition the exchange was cut down to the present format and the power
mults were dropped.
I feel membership complaints is about the only way ARRL will even consider
changes. Plus now the changes have to be discussed by the Contest Advisory
committee and finally by the HQ Membership Services Committee with the
approval of the Board of Directors.
Just enjoy the SS. I think the one thing that is missing is having the line
scores in QST. Many of us could only work a few hours so the listings
showed a nice score for 5 or 10 hours. W2RU (ex K2KIR) and I tried for a
number of years to politic to get the scores back in QST but we finally gave
up.
73 Dave K4JRB
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