[CQ-Contest] IARU HQ Stations

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 11:26:05AM -0400, Dennis McAlpine wrote:
> Yes, Jim, this year's ARRL HQ stations moved things up a bit but look at
> some of the Europeans and their geographic diversification.  Following their
> example, why shouldn't we have stations spread out all over the country,
> e.g. K1EA, N2RM, W3LPL, W4MYA, etc.  In fact, given the geographic range,
> why not have multiple statins on the same band, e.g. a W6 on 80 at the same
> time as a W2.  OK, so you can't have multiple statios on the same band.  How
> about a half hour from the East, then a half hour from midwest, then a half
> hour from west coast and keep repeating the process.  Tht would allow us to
> use 36 different stations (6 bands X 2 modes x 3 stations per mode).
> Imagine merging those logs.

Actually, the software we used at W1AW/5 is 95% of the way to making that
sort of operation quite feasible.  The stations at W1AW/5 were all 
interconnected by TCP/IP over the internet, so whether they are in the same
state or not is pretty minimally important.  And since the complete log
of the entire operation was always available to each of the stations in
realtime, you wouldn't need to worry about dupes or not knowing which bands 
to pass calling stations to, etc.

The next big step in the software would be to integrate some very responsive 
inter-station signalling that required few keystrokes to send and little 
brain-power to receive.  Signals like "I am now QRT - you take it over from
here," or "I can hear him well enough to complete the QSO, please standby
while I work him" and such boiled down to something that makes it fast
was the one trick we lacked at W1AW/5.  Such signalling might also find itself
useful for traditional multi-multis.

With this sort of idea, if you had three stations on 80SSB, you could have 
the midwest station CQing, and then whenever a caller comes along whom he 
cannot hear, you could have the east coast or west coast stations jump in
on a QSO-by-QSO basis to complete the contacts while still limiting the
team to one transmitted signal per band-mode at a time.

-- 
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Kenneth E. Harker      "Vox Clamantis in Deserto"      kharker at cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin                   Amateur Radio Callsign: WM5R
Department of the Computer Sciences      VP, Central Texas DX & Contest Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124                         Maintainer of Linux on Laptops
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA            http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
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