[CQ-Contest] Casual contesters...

[Tim Makins, EI8IC]

It would be interesting to know too how the world's ham population is
changing; current totals, number of silent keys, number of newbies. Is there
a graph anywhere ?? Maybe you were just worked by a lot of newbies in what
is, after all a fairly easy contest to be involved with, as far as DX
entrants are involved.. (Just point and shoot at the big signals from a
fixed direction...) Lets hope the newbies ARE on the increase, otherwise we,
like the spark-gap, are history !

Tim, EI8IC

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pete Smith" <n4zr at contesting.com>
To: <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: 11 March 2001 20:06
Subject: [CQ-Contest] Casual contesters...


 >
 > I thought people might find the following weird factoid interesting.
 >
 > I send QSLs for every unique DX QSO -- that is, for a given station, every
 > band-mode combination.  Since moving to my present QTH in December 1994,
 > I've had roughly 40,000 QSOs, of which at least 38,000 have been in
 > contests.  I was current on QSLing as of February 8 of this year, when I
 > sent some 3000 cards to the outgoing bureau.
 >
 > I've been hoping that my annual box to the bureau would begin to taper off
 > somewhat, so after this year's ARRL DX CW I checked to see how many QSL
 > requirements that contest alone would generate.  To my surprise, out of
 > 2899 valid QSOs, 1498 met my QSLing criteria!  Put another way, over half
 > my QSOs were with stations that I had never worked on that band and mode
 > before.
 >
 > By contrast, in last years CQWWCW, out of 2667 QSOs, only 956 met the
 > uniqueness criteria.
 >
 > Does this mean that the ARRL DX contest attracts more casual DX
 > participants, perhaps because of WAS? Or????
 >
 > 73, Pete N4ZR

 >


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