[CQ-Contest] Distributed Multi-Ops and Experimental Class

[Ward Silver]

> 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.

> On Mon, 5 Aug 2002 10:30:01 -0500, Ken Harker wrote:
> 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.

I have been suggesting an "Experimental" category in regular contests for just this kind of activity.  There's really no reason why not to try it in, say, CQ WW except for it not meeting the requirements for any of the categories.  I think an Experimental category would open the doors to some innovations.  

About the only requirement for Experimental category would be to obey all the rules of your ham license and whatever you do, you have to write it up and explain it publically so we can all think about it.  You might want to restrict it a tad by limits on one signal per band, 1500 watts maximum output, etc.  If the contest sponsors don't want to implement another category, then submit the results as a check log and write it up anyway.  If it's a really good idea, either the idea will be adopted or you can start a new contest.

As far as just distributed efforts, you can have distributed M/S or M/M as with W1AW/5, although identification gets a little sticky on a worldwide basis.  You could also have distributed teams.  There comes a whole new set of interesting strategic problems like how to allocate bands as the earth rotates.  What if you have enough bandwidth to listen from remote sites?  What if a single-op has a half-dozen remote stations?  The possibilities are pretty wide open.  The Internet offers a tremendous dose of technology, why don't we make it possible to use it, while still retaining an emphasis on operating skill?

73, Ward N0AX




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