[CQ-Contest] Hear and be heard

[Pete Smith]

At 12:59 PM 3/13/99 -0600, KG5U wrote:
>At XA5T, I picked a few off that way by just waiting out the
>pileup when I couldn't get a call or at least three or four of
>the prefix/suffix characters (I purposely tried to stay away from
>saying something like "oscar--november-juliet - 59 k" for fear of
>encouraging sufixing.....).
>
>I didn't notice much in the way of deterioration of the pileup
>ettiquite or courtesy by picking off the late-callers.  When I
>could, I would certainly pick off the first wave, but that was
>sometimes impossible.
>
>I think the only danger is that the late caller may find himself
>calling when you are transmitting and, thus may cause
>interference to the receiving station.  But, that may be
>inconsequential.

That's exactly the danger I was referring to, but I guess I should have
qualified this some ... it seems to take a couple of successful late calls
before discipline starts to break down, so if you go back to pulling calls
out quickly, things never totally disintegrate.  

It's also particularly problematical on the lower bands, where on-frequency
interference from continuous callers is a big problem ... and easier to get
away with on 10 and 15, where the callers are rarely loud to each other.
And of course, XA5T was pretty loud all over the US and Canada!  

One of the most memorable instances from last year's ARRL contest was a TU
... suffix deleted to protect the innocent ... who never got a call out of
the initial pile, and whose frequencies went to chaos in 3 minutes or less.


73, Pete Smith N4ZR
n4zr at contesting.com 

Loud is.


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