Another reason why I don't think this practice is correct is in the rules
for the contest:
10. *Exchange*: Operator name and station location (state, province or
country) for North American stations; operator name only for non-North
American stations.
If your name is Ed and you send Carl, you are not giving the operator's
name. Though obviously nobody in the contest committee seems to care.
Greg
On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 6:52 AM, <w5gn@mxg.com> wrote:
I had planned to wait until after the contest deadline to share this
experience with you but now that it's been well publicized, there is no
reason to wait.
Contest weekend was superb. This was the ten-hour North American QSO
Party, in which the exchange is your NAME and STATE/PROVINCE/COUNTRY,
limited to 100 watts (which is really well obeyed in this one contest!!).
You can pick your name - one Mexican is always LOCO - and frequently,
hams
will all use the name of a "SK" - "Silent Key" in memory, and this time
there were over 50 stations using CARL, for a good friend, Carl Cook, who
died a week or so ago.
I chose JESUISCHARLIE.
First of all, that's LONG compared to BOB/JIM etc (but I can remember
our
son Nathaniel Lee's early papers with his NATHAN across the top and the
I E
L going down the side of the page).
So I didn't "RUN" and call CQ (since then a nice guy calling to give ME a
point would have the unexpected challenge of that long and
maybe-not-recognizable-when-you-are-writing-it-down-a-letter-at-a-time.
Instead, I "Search and Pounced" (NO INTERNET SPOTTING IN THIS CONTEST)
tuning to find a station that was calling CQ, but I'd also listen to see
if
he had a "pileup" of callers, and I waited until he had at least two
unanswered CQs before making my call. I'd also note how fast he was
sending, and set my CW speed to match his.
Most fun, were the hot-hots sending at 40 wpm (which is about as fast as
99% can copy), who are supposed to be able to COPY EXACTLY WHAT WAS SENT
for the name, and who couldn't handle the 13 characters at their own
speed,
who'd come back with "??"
so I'd drop the speed by 9 wpm and resend, and they'd still not get it,
so
I sent a stored message at only 18 wpm with a full space between each
letter, and a dozen hot-shots still needed a third or fourth repeat.
As a group, the most accurate were the VERY SLOW CQ'ers, sending at 12-15
wpm. When I sent the spaced name at that same speed, almost everyone had
the name on the first transmission! At that speed mentally you still are
sending letters rather than words and the slow users are thus expecting
to
hear letters and not words and thus that they didn't know JE SUIS is
French
didn't confuse them.
I had two fast stations reply "NIL" - Not In Log - when I sent the name -
my presumption is they did copy and didn't like the message or length,
and
one station did say the name was too long.
I had another five or six that tried several times, but who politely gave
up with a 73 SORRY (I think signal rather than CW was the problem), and
there were a handful that just QSY'd from their RUN frequency without a
reply after I sent the exchange a couple of times.
BUT::: I had 50 out of 350 QSOs who made specific responses, including
GREAT, D'ACCORD, LIKE IT, THANKS, SUPER, ROGER, MCI (CW for French
Merci),
and similar expressions.
In case you didn't know Merrill comes from the French merle for the Black
Birds that were common to the area near the Swiss border from whence they
came, until the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre in 1582 (Catholics killing
Huguenots) drove them from France to England until 1630 when Nathaniel
came
to Newburyport, MA, in 1630.
73
MERRILLY NEW YEAR
Barry Merrill, W5GN
After the contest, I looked into the issue of the Cabrillo Format for the
NAME.
The Cabrillo format does NOT specify if fields are fixed length or not,
but the template for the
NAQP does show 10 positions for NAME, although there is NO statement in
the RULES of the maximum
NAME length).
However, the NAQP robot (and perhaps other or all robots) actually treat
the Cabrillo data as
variable length fields, delimited by a space, so I think it depends
totally on your logging
program's choice as to how many characters of what you entered for NAME
is
output in the
Cabrillo file.
-----Original Message-----
From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of
Fred Kleber
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2015 11:16 AM
To: CQ-Contest@contesting.com
Subject: [CQ-Contest] NAQP CW Op Name - Je suis Charlie
In the recent NAQP contest, there was a station who used 'JESUISCHARLIE'
for his name. This name is too long to fit in the standard Cabrillo
field
for operator name. I submitted my log with what I copied for a name,
even
though it makes the QSO line longer than permitted by Cabrillo format.
Any
idea how the contest organizers will score this? KL9A - Are you on the
reflector?
73,
Fred, NP2X
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