Rule for consideration for next year:
You can work yourself for QSO points once every 10 minutes.
Barry W2UP
On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 5:18 PM <kq2m@kq2m.com> wrote:
>
> I self-spotted quite a bit this past weekend after vowing NOT do do so
> before the contest. But, having been spotted so little in past
> contests, especially on SSB, I decided to test the hypothesis that I
> have had that SPOTS MATTER! I had very mixed feelings about doing so
> since before ARRLDXCW I had NEVER self-spotted, not even outside of
> contests!
>
> I didn't self spot at first but with the mediocre Saturday 20 meter
> conditions I decided to give it a shot
> and the results were fascinating to me. Early on, a self-spot was
> usually met with callers within 30 seconds - 1 minute, mostly multis
> but some single ops as well. Then within the next 5 - 10 minutes, at
> some point, there would be an EXPLOSION, ALL AT ONCE, at some point.
> Now when I was low in the band early in the contest you could say that
> the callers were the result of people tuning and I was fresh meat so
> people would call me anyway, and that was true, but the sudden BURST
> that would occur and the magnitude of loud callers going from maybe 3 -
> 5 to 50 ALL AT ONCE, was more than just people tuning across my freq.
>
> This pattern consistently repeated itself the same way for most of the
> weekend. Sometimes when the band was open well (not just spotlight
> propagation), I might get called by 4 - 5 UA4/RK4/R4 stations right in
> a row where none had called me before. Same thing with DL's, G's, PA's
> and other high volume countries. It was like some local packet/spotting
> network that was active, had my call on it and people responded ALL AT
> ONCE
> based on their local spotting network, not DX Summit, which was the only
> network that I self-spotted on.
>
> There is no question that continuing to self-spot for most of the
> weekend (except when the pileup got too large), kept the rate higher
> than it would
> have been without doing so. And self-spotting was ESPECIALLY effective
> when I changed run frequencies on an existing band, moved to a new band,
> or was not working anyone and then with in minutes I had a good run
> going.
>
> The only times that a self-spot did not generate callers was when I was
> either not being heard (fairly frequently apparently) thanks to
> qrm/qrn/qsb, or the band was dying. And then at the end when I was on 10
> or 15 and most of the available callers on that band had either already
> worked me or were calling cq themselves.
>
> What it did not seem to do was to bring in any more mults than I would
> normally get. But of course this was only one weekend - so only one
> "data point" and one data point in which cndx were exceptionally erratic
> and un predictable thanks to ** 4 ** different M-class flares DURING
> the contest, which as far as I can remember, was the most M Class flares
> that I have ever seen in one contest weekend!
>
> After the contest I searched for my call on DX Summit to see who spotted
> me and noticed that almost no one did besides myself. Equally
> interesting was doing a search for calls on several different serious
> High Power Single Op ALL Band guys and noticing that they were not being
> spotted either sometimes for as many as 10 - 12 hours even though they
> were obviously loud and making thousands of qso's. I did not expect
> this at all. It seems like the normal spotters went on strike this
> weekend seemingly determined NOT to spot anyone.
>
> 73
>
> Bob, KQ2M
>
>
> On 2023-03-08 16:25, Edward Sawyer wrote:
> > I am interested to hear the opinion of the DX side on this topic. I
> > was trying to self-spot a number of times without much success.
> > I tried on DX Summit. The spot was posted.
> > I tried on DX Watch. The spot was posted.
> > I tried on DX Heat and it stated that self spotting was not allowed.
> >
> > What I found was that the self spot almost never generated any
> > activity - maybe a couple of callers. But then later (sometimes 10
> > mins or more later) a huge group of callers would respond to a spot.
> > The spot was always generated on the EU side of the pond.
> >
> > I am thinking that most people have a filter set to only see EU side
> > spots. Is that true? If so, then there is almost zero value in self
> > spotting. In fact its counter productive if people are now spotting
> > less because they think we are self spotting so what's the value in
> > spotting.
> >
> > Any comments on this topic welcome.
> >
> > Ed N1UR
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