I strongly disagree with W2GD on one thing though. DX Contesting is an
East Coast Old Boys' Club, and while it makes them happy and boosts
their egos, it is NOT good for contesting in general. There is VERY
little interest in DX contesting west of the Rockies in proportion to
the numbers of hams in each region. It is LONG past time for DX
Contest scoring rules to be changed so that those outside the East
Coast are in the game.
I agree with you on this one but it is a different can of worms. I have
yet to hear of a scoring system that would allow stations in the black
hole of middle America and west compete against the East Coast stations.
Since the organizers are almost all East Coasters there probably is not
much interest in changing their contests.
As K0EU said after the ARRL DX contest, he worked his ass off and
probably broke the record in Colorado but won't even finish near the
top 10.
The only chance we had was when JA's could be worked for hours in the
evenings and we had to have decent EU openings.
Probably the only fair way would be to make each state effectively a
separate country and you would compete against people in your state,
which are about the same size as many EU countries, however Colorado
would never win the NA award.
I was surprised that 20m was not filled edge to edge with contest
stations during the ARRL SSB contest. Maybe people are tiring of the
inequities.
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