[CQ-Contest] Sprint skills

[Tree]

One of the many skills that are essential to do well in the sprint is 
being able to quickly figure out what is going on when you tune into
a frequency - and reacting to it without thinking.

This is also an essential skill for many other contests.  My ideal WRTC
partner would be someone who can tune up and down a band and quickly
come up with a list of stations that need to be worked.  The more 
efficiently they can do this - the quicker we can put some new mults
(or QSOs) into the log.  

No other contest teaches this better than the sprints.  All of the 
consistent top ten CW Sprint operators would be at the top of my list 
of WRTC partners due to this one reason alone.

Also - I find that the 4 hour sprint when done with two radios requires
much more energy than most other contests - even with longer durations.
It was pretty easy to operate the recent Stew Perry contest - with 99
percent of my QSOs responding to my CQs.  I could even take a break 
when I needed to - or eat dinner when pressing F1.  Try that in a 
sprint.  

As far as limited # of logs compared to other contest, there are many
reasons for this.  The SS has a club category - so a lot of non-competitive
entries are submitted for this purpose alone.  I think it is obvious that
there is a much higher percentage of people who are "full time competitive
entries" in the CW sprint.  Making the top ten in the SS CW is probably
easier to do.  Heck, I even made it with low power this year.

I am glad the WRTC choose to include this in their criteria.  It is too
bad the contest isn't "open" to everyone around the world, so in this
case, it gives an advantage to the W/VE ops.  

Another great advantage of the CW Sprint is that I have yet to see anyone
accused of using packet when they shouldn't have been.

73 Tree N6TR
tree at kkn.net