[CQ-Contest] what defines QRP/LP??

[Kelly Taylor]

Going by ERP would be troublesome, to say the least.

Since you cannot accurately estimate the electrical length of coax, you
won't be able to accurately estimate loss, either.  And even if you could,
how many people know to the foot how much coax is between rig and antenna
anyway? You'd have to carry a wattmeter to the antenna!

And for most antennas, the gain inversely follows the SWR curve across the
band. How do you compensate for that? And then, are you allowed to increase
RF out when a station isn't centered on your beam's pattern? Or is located
outside the peak takeoff angle?

Would you then let stations with negative total gain run more than 5w TX so
they could equal 5w ERP?

And by what metric would you allow stations to measure their gain that would
be accepted universally?

And then do you place the same restrictions on the other power levels?

Quite the can of worms opened by that question, no?

73, kelly
ve4xt



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Smith W9WI" <w9wi at earthlink.net>
To: "cq-contest" <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 11:21 PM
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] what defines QRP/LP??


> On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 18:33, Mike Coslo wrote:
> >     Since we have some problems figuring out what QRP means to begin
> > with, what about ERP? If a person is running more than 5 watts ERP are
> > they in compliance even though they are running 5 watts out of the
> > transmitter?
>
> ARRL rules mention only transmitter power output.  While I haven't read
> the rules to the CQ or NCJ contests I'm quite confident they're similar
> in this respect.
>
> For most amateurs I think accurately calculating their ERP would be more
> of a challenge than winning the CQ WW!
> -- 
> Doug Smith W9WI
> Pleasant View (Nashville), TN  EM66
> http://www.w9wi.com
>
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