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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