[CQ-Contest] SS, Sunday, and Some Suggestions

[Jimk8mr at aol.com]

Based on the scores and comments following the SSB SS it appears that it was 
a good weekend and a good contest.

Unlike reports after the CW weekend, there were few comments about how bad 
things were on Sunday.  From the SSB perspective SS does not seem to be 
broken.

The CW SS does have problems, partly because we have become so good that we 
work just about everybody long before the contest ends, and partly because 
just about everybody in the  CW SS is eligible for QCWA membership.  From my 
CW logs, which admitedly may be skimming the cream of the CW operator crop, 
I'd estimate that 80%+ of the checks were from 1976 or before. OTOH on SSB I 
my check (64) was among the older ones.

With a CW requirement of 5 wpm (and probably soon heading down from there), 
like it or not, things are not about to get better. People getting into ham 
radio aren't doing so because they want to operate CW. 

But there are still enough people who like CW, and CW contesting, to keep CW 
SS viable for a good while longer.
To do that we need to reconsider some long standing rules that have become 
counterproductive.


As you may be aware, for a number of years I have been operating CW SS under 
the self-defined cagegory of "single op multi station".  This means I operate 
4 or 5 hours from each of 5 or 6 different stations.  I don't show up high in 
the listings, but I have a great time. For me the contest gets better as the 
weekend goes on. I have never had a person complain that I gave them 5 qsos 
during the weekend instead of just one.

This year my contest club was making a serious effort at winning the medium 
club competition.  A few people questioned me about whether my using up 5 
entries was the best use of club resources, vs. doing a more conventional 
operation and taking only one.  There was also a push in the club to do 
multiop efforts to maximize the points per entry. Many of those who operated 
at the multis have at least a small home station, which probably did not get 
on the air to be a source of qsos for others.

Time will tell if I did the right thing for the club. But I am sure that I 
did the right thing for making CW SS better for everyone else.  And it led me 
to think about several rules that may discourage people from doing the small 
time operations that can make a difference in activity.


What needs to be changed?  

1. Club categories should be based on the number of members participating 
rather than the number of entries. My participation, whether from one or five 
stations, should count as one member's effort. Likewise if 4 guys do a 
multiop, that should count as four people's effort. (The rules in place 
concerning newbies at a multiop should remain). If a guy does some time at a 
multiop and goes home to make some more qsos, that extra effort should not 
count toward pushing the club out of its class.  We should encourage the 
maximum number of stations on the air, not the maximum operator/station ratio.

2. The restriction on operation of a transmitter under more than one callsign 
(General Rule 3.5), and of use of more than one callsign from a given 
location (General Rule 3.3), should be relaxed or eliminated.  Some 
restriction on "manufactured contacts" should remain. But if someone wants to 
start over with a new call, it should be encouraged so long as they work 
people on a non-discriminatory basis. (Not just work their own club members, 
for example).  

The use of a second call has potential for abuse, such as using it to get or 
hold a frequency during off times. Therefore it might be appropriate that 
once a new call is used, a transmitter and/or operator may not use any 
previous calls.

3.  The requirement that both a station owner and operator must be club 
members (General Rule 8.5.1) should changed so that only the operator must be 
a club member. The present rule is already easily circumvented by simply 
using the operator's call rather than the owner's call.

There are a lot of stations out there that would be fine SS stations, 
especially for a part time effort, but whose owners have little or no 
interest in joining a contest club. (Think DXers or Old Timers). If a club 
member can find such a station and put it on the air in SS, it would help 
everyone in the contest. There is no reason not to credit the operator's club 
with the points the operator generates by doing so.

The number of CW operators isn't growing, and there is no reason to expect 
that it ever will. If we want to keep CW SS interesting, having some guys 
making multiple qsos will be needed.  At the same time these changes would 
not have a radical effect on SS, as would the drastic solutions (e.g. qsos 
once per band) that have been suggested by others.

If only 10 guys per call area activated an extra station - there's another 
hundred qsos waiting to be worked.  Why are we waiting? 


73  -  Jim  K8MR

Operator of N8TR, AC8E, K8MR, W8AJ, and K8AZ in the 2001 CW SS.




--
CQ-Contest on WWW: http://lists.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests: cq-contest-REQUEST at contesting.com