[CQ-Contest] 'TEST' or not to 'TEST'

[Ed Parish K1EP]

At 2/27/04 10:58 AM, Chuck wrote:

>4 - at 'contest speeds' it takes VERY little time
>to send and even over 48 hours is not going to
>make a hill of beans difference in terms of time
>freed up for other 'things'.
>
>5 - It's a pretty standardized routine to hear
>the invitation part of the call (i.e. 'CQ',
>'Test', 'QRZ?' BEFORE the callsign. Doing it
>backwards, is well, backwards.

As it has been pointed out before, if I am tuning the band, I might miss your preamble.  I hear your call, once, maybe twice.  Are you calling someone?  Are you calling CQ?  Are you repeating your call as a fill?  How do I know?  If I don't hear that much activity, should I assume that you are calling someone or filling rather than my stealth mismatching wire is not hearing the pileup?   As you point out in #4, there is very little time wasted in sending TEST (or NV as someone pointed out).  When you are calling CQ, you are inviting others to call you.  For you to win, you want to snag the second and third tier players, make it inviting for them to call you.  I do a lot of S&P and it sometimes gets confusing and annoying to stick around to find out what is going on.  If the CQ'ing is not automatic, you have to sometimes deal with long pauses between CQ's, invariably when all you have is the tail end of a call and he is stretching and taking a swig of coffee.  This is not directly at you Chuck, but people should try S&P in an unassisted single op class sometime.