[CQ-Contest] QSO B4

[Bruce Sawyer]

kharker at cs.utexas.edu sez:

"Bill describes a moment on Sunday morning when a packet spot was sent
out with his run frequency, but spotting the call A35RK, resulting in having
to send "five or six" QSO B4 messages before the pileup subsided.  According
to Bill, these were stations who "should know better" because they were not
"bothering to listen for [his] callsign."

     I have no idea wheter PY0FF was signing every QSO, every-other QSO, or
what during that portion of the contest.  But, one of my personal pet peeves
is stations (usually DX) who sign very infrequently and then get indignant
when you dupe them."

Speaking from the other side of the pile, I can say that I have tried
signing after every single Q and also varying things such that I sign only
every second or third Q when I hear multiple callers.  My dupe rate really
doesn't seem to vary much (though the rate surely does!); I will still get
between 0.5% and 1.0% dupes over the course of a 48 hour contest no matter
what I do. (Do the arithmetic--that amounts to a LOT of wasted time over a
weekend.)   I hate to say it, but the basic problem is that most hams simply
can't copy CW.  Occasionally I will get a guy who sends what he thinks is my
call, and even when I correct him he still feeds back what he thinks it is
he has copied, which is wrong.  And I have had exactly the same phenomenon
mentioned above happen to me when people put out a bad spot on me.  It's
almost comical, watching all the big M/M stations start banging away when
they think they have unearthed fresh meat--and it doesn't seem to make any
difference how much I try to emphasize what my call really is.  What's even
more amusing is to get mobbed by all the guys claiming SO status when an
erroneous packet spot appears.   And by the way--I never argue about dupes.
It takes too much time.  I just log 'em and move on--but over time I do tend
to notice the people who can't ever seem to get it right.

Just as humorous anecdote, I wish some of you could have been at my side
back in '98 when I first showed up in contests as ZF2NT.  Everybody and his
brother was using a master.dat which listed W5ASP's alter ego of ZF2NE, but
not my call.  I would have loved to have seen the log checking results to
see how many people logged me as NE instead of NT, because I know it was a
whole bunch.

Bruce, ZF2NT