I agree with Ken's email.
Why should there be any difference between a VHF and HF contests general
rules?
Using means other than the radio diminishes a contact in my eyes. While
packet alerts you to a station being at a specific frequency he does not
know who might be calling him.
Making a contact when both sides know what is coming is much different than
having to dig out a callsign out of the noise.
CC Packet Cluster W0MU-1
W0MU.NET or 67.40.148.194
"A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may
never get over." Ben Franklin
-----Original Message-----
From: vhfcontesting-bounces@contesting.com
[mailto:vhfcontesting-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth E. Harker
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:16 AM
To: VHF Contesting
Cc: acurtis@suddenlink.net
Subject: Re: [VHFcontesting] My Proposal to the VUAC
I haven't commented on this yet, so here goes. FWIW, I am in the West
Gulf Division and try to operate at least one or two VHF contests a year (as
a guest op or multiop), with a particular interest in the six meter band
over the others. I began contesting about 50% VHF, 50% HF, but in recent
years I have been doing a lot more HF contesting. I have been actively
contesting since 1996. I am in the West Gulf Division, and I have a strong
negative reaction to Marshall's proposal.
> Via the responses that I received, I have come to understand that
> there are some ops who believe in what most would call Search &
> Pounce(S&P)--tuning the bands carefully, listening for others calling
> CQ or calling CQ yourself, and making whatever contacts come your way.
> The people who are into this mode of operation believe that this
> method produces a contact that is "more pure", "more valid", or "more
valuable"
> than contacts made via schedules.
I've never heard the term "Search & Pounce" used to describe calling CQ and
waiting for responses. S&P refers to tuning the radio and looking for
others calling CQ. The act of calling CQ and waiting for responses is most
often referred to as "running" or "CQing". They are two different
activities.
But, syntax issues aside, Marshall makes a valid point - many of us feel
that unscheduled (or "random" if you want to use meteor scatter operation
terminology) QSOs are what the contests should be about. Contesting should
be about operating the radio - and schedules (especially real-time schedules
made out-of-band on the internet or via telephone) are contrary to that
philosophy because they remove key elements of the radio operation skill set
from the equation.
> I have nothing against the guys that wish to operate in this manner
> and I believe that they should continue to operate in a manner that
> they enjoy. However, to those of us that believe in "making as many
> contacts as possible, on as many different bands as possible, to as
> many different VHF stations as possible, for as long a distance as
> possible", this is just not a very efficient method of operation. I
> want to be WORKING as many stations as possible during the contest
> period. As I said in Appendix 1, "In the VHF world, you must have
> precise control of antenna pointing(both directions), frequency, mode,
> sequencing, and the time of the attempt to make a single contact".
> Assistance makes this possible as opposed to just hoping that you
> "bump" into another station on the bands.
Many VHF ops have this unfortunate opinion that finding other stations on
the air is all accidental or fortuitous. It is more difficult than on HF.
It does take skill, and you get better at it with practice.
Consider Marshall's position taken to its logical conclusion. If all, or a
large percentage, of contest QSOs are being made because of off-air
scheduling arrangements, how are newcomers going to break into the action?
They won't. They will feel excluded, and because most of the so-called
radio contest is actually taking place off the air, they won't be able to
connect with it. The joy of operating a radio contest is in operating the
radio with a wild, unpredictable natural environment - not in operating an
email client or a web browser.
I would counter-propose that ARRL VHF contests should adopt the same
philosophy as the (much more successful) ARRL HF contests and ban
pre-arranged schedules for making contacts during the contest. If stations
need to find one another on the air, there will be more CQing, more tuning,
more overall activity to benefit everyone.
> Because I believe that "Contacts are King", how and when "assistance"
> is rendered is just not an important issue. If you make a schedule
> before the contest or during the contest, is just not relevant.....you
> still have to WORK the other station while observing the strict
> definition of what constitutes a VHF contact(Tilton's Rule). Via
> reflectors and/or propagation loggers, you would know who was on and where
they were.
> This would allow you to work as many of them as possible. Since
> everyone(except Rovers) has the Internet these days, there is no
> advantage to one station over another. On the other side of that
> coin, it does me no good to know that W7XYZ/R is in CN88 ready to run
> the bands. I can't work him anyway.
This is an awful idea. How are you operating your radio if you find all the
stations you "work" via the internet? How fun is that? No fun at all. It
is so much more challenging, interesting, and fun to not know the call sign
or grid locator of the other station until you work them.
Correctly copying call signs is an important skill that contesting rewards.
Getting an unknown call sign right despite accents, unusual phonetics,
fading, weak signals, QRM, noise, etc., etc. can be hard but very
satisfying.
If you already know the other stations' call sign and grid locator before
you ever hear their signal, you have completely removed accurate copying
from the challenge of the QSO. Let's not make VHF contesting so boring and
easy that nobody wants to do it anymore.
> Speaking of rovers, how will all this affect them? The most common
> complaint that I have heard from rover stations is that they arrive at
> some new grid, sometimes a rare one, and they cannot "attract"
> anyone's attention. So they sit there for an hour or two and work
> only a very few stations.
Getting people off the internet and back to tuning their own radios is the
best way to fix this. Encouraging people to use the internet more (probably
with the radio volume turned down so they can concentrate on the screen) is
the wrong answer to this problem.
> I have heard this complaint over and over again--from
> rovers here in the West Gulf Division as well as from rovers around
> the country. It is very frustrating to the rover guys when this
> happens--and it seems to happen a lot. An Assisted Rover could call
> several of the big stations in his area on the cell phone and alert
> them that "I am in EL28 and ready to run". This would allow the rover
> to work as many stations as possible--which is, after all, why he is
> out there. As an added bonus, other stations(both Assisted and
> Non-Assisted) would hear these contacts being made. This would result
> in additional contacts that would otherwise never occur.
This is possibly the worst idea ever. Do we really want competitive
stations to employ a "telephone operator" going through lists of phone
numbers for all known stations within 800 miles, calling them to make sure
they get on and work them? Or writing contest spam bots to do the same
thing every 15 minutes? How is that operating a radio contest?
Marshall presents a situation that seems harmless enough at first, but it
doesn't take a lot of forethought to see that the logical conclusion of this
direction is absurd.
I hope the ARRL VUAC continues to see value in sponsoring radio competitions
rather than internet competitions.
--
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker@kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/
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