[CQ-Contest] Calls and such

[Pete Smith]

At 09:30 PM 3/11/03 +0000, Tom Horton wrote:
>Well, just gotta throw my two cents worth in.

Well, OK, me too.  I've had my suffix for 49 years, and the whole call 
since 1977.  I think that a whole lot of the secret is consistency.  Get 
one call, stay with it, and be active.  On phone, I like my call because it 
doesn't need phonetics -- in fact I find more people have trouble with the 
"R" if I use a phonetic than if I don't.  JA's are an exception, but that's 
purely a quirk of our respective languages.

On CW, years of looking at my own and others' UBN reports have convinced me 
that the biggest problems are alphabetic characters containing three or 
four dots that occur in places where one might logically expect numbers.  H 
becomes 5, B becomes 6, V becomes 4, and so on,m particularly at speeds of 
30 wpm and above.  There's an "I" station whose entire suffix consists of 
"s"s and "H"s, isn't there?

Once in a VERY great while, someone turns my call into NV6R, but even 
though 2X1s are common now, 1X2s are still a lot more so.  So usually, 
people quickly default to N4.  Once that's set in their minds, the third 
character can't be a number, can it?


73, Pete N4ZR
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