[CQ-Contest] Your Posts to CQ-Contest

[n3bb@mindspring.com]

Hello Bob.  

If you are serious about contesting, and want to learn the techniques and methods that can be used to operate a contest in a competitive fashion, I would be glad to help.  My IARU score was over a million, and that was comprised of 1822 contacts in 185 different ITU Zones.  N7MAL's response to you was pretty much accurate.  It will take excellent antennas and a KW to score in this area, however people routinely score very well with 100 watts.  Good antennas, however, are required in all cases.  

Over and above the hardware will be experience in propagation and the use of software, along with a keen ear for picking out calls.  A high score these days is always done by mainly calling CQ most of the time.  That's rule number one: hold a frequency and call CQ, then answer the responders and do it again.  "Repeat and repeat."  A large number of the multipliers will answer the CQer, but not all of them.  To hunt multipliers, along with the other stations mainly calling CQ, you need to *listen* at the same time you CQ.  That is accomplished with the two radio set up, called SO2R.  Therefore you can call CQ constsntly on the most productive band, or a band where you need a lot of new things and you haven't "milked" it already.  Along with CQing, you use the second radio and continually troll up and down, up and down, all the time, the other bands, looking for stations to call.  You will find both new multipliers there along with plain old new stations even they are not multipliers.  A software program is needed to operate the station doing this SO2R thing.  Oh yes, it takes years of experience to be able to listen and handle the two audio streams, etc.  It's, frankly, a hard hobby, and it takes skill, grit, and determination.  I sometimes wonder why I didn't get into something with more popular appeal, since the average Joe Public doesn't care much about our hobby or our competitive aspect-contesting.  But I do love it, and like the competition very much.

Good luck.  If you want to see my station, it's 15 miles West of Austin in the Hill Country.

73,
Jim George N3BB