[CQ-Contest] Club Areas

[Kenneth Earl Harker]

Thus spoke Zack Lau:
> 
> Ward Silver wrote:
> 
> > Assuming hams form a relatively constant fraction of the total population
> > across the US.  
> 
> I talked with Pete, K9PW about this in regards to VHF contests.
> The big cities form a "black hole."  Lots of people live there,
> but you couldn't figure it out from VHF contest logs.  Serious 
> VHF contesters invariably live in the small towns and suburbs. 
> I don't know of any big city in the USA with a healthy population 
> of big contest stations--Zack W1VT

     I would say that in Texas, this isn't the case.  Sure, inner city areas 
have relatively sparse "serious" VHF contester populations for all those 
familiar reasons of antenna restrictions, lack of acreage for antenna farms,
high noise levels, etc.  My station is about as inner city as you can get, 
and I understand very well why people want to go out to the noise-free country
to operate.  But, when I think of the thirty or so most active, 
non-rover VHF contest stations in Texas, I can think of maybe three or 
four that don't fit into the "greater Austin," "greater San Antonio," 
"greater Houston," or "greater Dallas" categories.  

     Take grid square EL19, for instance.  EL29 is Houston (4th largest city 
in the U.S.) with many active hams, EL09 is San Antonio (10th largest city in 
the U.S.) with quite a few active hams, and EM00/EM10 is Austin (fast 
approaching 700K population) with a lot of active VHFers.  And EL19 has
maybe two permanent six meter stations I can think of, and off the top of my
head, I can't think of any permanent (i.e. non-rover) stations in the grid
on 144MHz or higher.  Similarly sparsely populated are EL08, EL18, EL28, 
EM01, EM20, etc.  If it weren't for rovers, the rest of us wouldn't work 
a good number of these grid squares during the contests that are well within 
300 miles of our stations.

     My guess is that in the northeast, the big cities' suburbs just run 
together.  Put the big cities 200 to 300 miles apart, and this doesn't happen.
Of course, when the big cities are 200 to 300 miles apart, one's concept of 
what constitutes a "city" probably changes.

-- 
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Kenneth E. Harker      "Vox Clamantis in Deserto"      kharker at cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin                  Amateur Radio Callsign: KM5FA
Department of the Computer Sciences         President, UT Amateur Radio Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124               Maintainer of the Linux Laptop Home Page
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA            http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
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