[CQ-Contest] Packet Pollution

[Mark Beckwith]

About Packet Pollution (TM) - I responded to Martin Luther privately at
first (two days ago) wondering what the fuss was all about.  I have been
off the air seriously for about 6 years and only got on for 6 hours this
time around from my car with 100W and a single wire antenna.  I felt rather
oblivious to reality but it sure was fun.  I wondered how much it really
had changed since the HC8U days of 89 and 90 because I remember "getting
spotted" back then and it was kind of neat to have a "little surge of
activity".  I guess it really has changed a LOT.

In the 80s when packet was young, a guy with a very well-known call said to
me casually "packet is great, now I am working a lot more countries on CW
because I know what the call is."  In a nutshell, I decided packet was BAD
and my crusade consisted of ALWAYS altering one letter ON PURPOSE in my
spots to weed out the fakers.

Packet didn't die.  While sitting out in the field in my car in the dark, I
felt very detached.  I have come to appreciate what has happened to our
complete communications network.  My place out in the country finally has
electircity, but still no phone, and no packet.  Of course no internet.  I
picked up my cell phone and called some of my contesting buddies around the
country to see how they were doing.  We talked about "the good old days."

I wish Packet would get removed from contesting.  It was so much easier
before...but I am getting older and slower.  Since that will never happen,
I must deal with it.  Here is what I would do if I were competitive:

American single ops can always ignore packet.  When I single op I will
ignore it, knowing people who use it are in a different category (they may
have seemed like "sissies" at one time, but now they've become brilliant
multi-tasking co-processing mega-humans which I wouldn't want to compete
against - God, I wish we could split out the SO2Rs as easily as that).
Multi ops have to use it in order to keep up with everyone else.  I would
wait for 10 minutes before going to the spot frequency.  Then, unlike most
people if you believe what you read, I would wait until I identified the DX
signal before calling...I still cannot believe it is as bad as all that.

Surely poor ops have ALWAYS been around, have ALWAYS transmitted at the
same time as the DX station because they are just plain idiots, and we have
ALWAYS had to copy through them.  And now we have better radios for that
job.  I don't get that big fuss.

Surely most competitive DX stations have ALWAYS loved having the activity
in their pileup surge - the more the better.  What is that all about? (with
all due respect to Tree, who lost his third layer of DLs - he still broke
the record for North America even with all those pesky 2-pointers, and I
bet the DLs hung around).

Finally, I think, as a DX station, if you don't like it you can always exit
the frequency.  Getting a pileup started in this contest if you are in a DX
location is not a very difficult thing.  The laugh will be on all those
idiot blind callers, while you're off working 4-5 a minute again.  Frankly
if enough of you guys did that, it would completely diminish the value of
packet - which I would personally like.

What a great conversation this is.

Mark, N5OT


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