[CQ-Contest] 24 vs 48 - NO NEW CAREGORIES!

[Pete Smith]

At 11:53 PM 2/7/03 -0500, Ron wrote:
>But with the non-contiguous 24 hours, a great deal more strategy
>comes into play as these ops try to pick their operating times to maximize
>propagation.  Which implies (all else being equal) a great deal more
>activity on the high bands than the low bands, which I believe was one of
>K4OJ's disagreements with that concept.

And this is where I part company with you and Jim.  In contests with mults 
that can be worked again on each band, there is powerful incentive to work 
all the bands to maximize your mult count.  Sure, you can probably get a 
better rate on the higher bands, but you won't get all the easy mults over 
again.


>I'm not saying that either of these two concepts is wrong; each has their
>strong and short points.  But I wonder if there is truly a need for the
>non-contiguous 24 hour category, especially in contests that limit SO
>stations to 36 hours maximum of the 48.

I agree that it would be redundant to have two "non-contiguous" categories 
in a contest that already has one.  The focus here was on CQWW and ARRL DX.

>To my thinking, the contiguous 24
>idea has a little more merit because it requires the operator, while
>carefully planning his start/stop times, to deal with one full
>round-the-clock cycle of operating -- which also gives the single band or
>limited band (be it high or low) ops an opportunity to work them, too.


But the big problem with this idea is that it requires the op to forgo one 
or the other high-rate high-band period, which may run contrary to the idea 
of attracting more activity.

A couple of us are working on a more-detailed proposal for the 
non-contiguous 24-hour variation, which we hope to make available as one 
basis for discussion soon.


73, Pete N4ZR
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