[CQ-Contest] Chiming in -- SO2R

[Leigh S. Jones]

Thank you to all who wrote to thank me for putting
into words what they had been thinking.  To those who
misunderstood, let me say that I am not on a campaign
to create new categories.  I blame myself for the 
misunderstanding.  Most of those who were slowly 
reeled in by my convoluted posting understood my
drift perfectly, however, which means I must be 
improving.

Frankly, the uproar regarding SO2R on the reflector
is a touch unsightly in my judgement.  I'm sure that 
there are a number of our contest brethren who 
misunderstand the issues and jump on the anti-SO2R 
bandwagon for the wrong reasons.  Many of these 
may think that SO2R represents a cheaters category
with multiple signals on the air at the same time.  
Those who see the SO2R skill as an issue of have's
vs. have-not's clearly overestimate the effectiveness
of the operating style.  I can tell you that a long time
ago I won the ARRL DX Phone Contest (the old 
96 hour affair) running SO2R, but that while I did
benefit from the method for about four hours on
Friday night of each contest weekend, the remainder
of the contest I was so overtired from the effort that
it may have actually resulted in an overall score 
reduction.

In fact, the main advantage I found in SO2R was 
that I didn't have to retune a Henry 2K each time
that I changed bands.  If I'd had a single transceiver
and an autotune Alpha 87 amplifier for that contest,
I am really convinced that I'd have improved on my
score.  And the truth is that I always seemed to 
limp to the finish on one transceiver after blowing 
out the front end of the other one some time during
the contest.  Still, it did allow me to constantly call
CQ to Japan all night on 40 phone while not 
completely ignoring the task of tuning for new 
multipliers on 75 phone.  In those days W4KFC 
and W9IOP no longer operated contests seriously,
and I was the contesting world's most ardent 
supporter of the advantages of SO2R.  

Now let me interject -- I truly rue the day that I
first saw the use of the term "SO2R" to describe
the operating style.  It immediately created a term
that sounds like category -- like "multioperator
single transmitter" -- and by the very existence of
the term it suggests that the practice should be 
vilified as if it were some form of cheating when 
compared to the purist's SO1R.  

What a tragedy it is that language has the power 
to do that to people's thought processes.  They 
jump to the conclusion that something that can
be named by a term that sounds like an entry
category must therefore become an entry category.  

And what a tragedy it is that our contesting 
community could become so divided over this 
issue that we'd expend the kind of effort we have 
discussing it while at the same time more serious
threats are overtaking us.  

Let's face it -- contesting is under siege from some
very potent enemies right now.  A slow proliferation 
of BPL installations might soon eliminate all forms of
HF radio.  Amateur radio as we know it could be 
swept away in the process.  But BPL would soon 
succumb to a simple fact of life -- it is woefully too 
slow to be of any serious use for computer
communications after a few short years.  BPL
is soon coming to a power line near you.  Can you
outlive it and be victorious when it goes the way 
of 8 track tapes?

Guys, let's get our act together and come up with
a category for the "have-nots" that addresses all
of the important issues, or else bury the hatchet and
stop attacking all forms of contesting that can be
reduced to two to four letter mnemonics.

KR6X

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dick Green WC1M" <wc1m at msn.com>
To: <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 10:47 PM
Subject: RE: [CQ-Contest] Chiming in -- SO2R


I really enjoyed this and the post from KR6X. 

I suggest that blah blah blah yaditta yaditta etc.