[CQ-Contest] Contesting is better without packet

[Zack Widup]

Hi Tree,

I did the entire time I put in on CW SS without packet, mostly by S&P. 
Missed out on NL and NT although I did spend an hour on Sunday morning 
trying to bust a pileup on a VO1 on 20m. Didn't get through.

The other section I missed was EWA, which evidently was missed by a lot of 
other people even though there were several active.

Toward the end of SS in particular, anyone who gets on to "hand out some 
points" gets a pileup.  I heard a huge pileup on a weak station on 40 on 
Sunday an hour before the contest was over.  It was a station in EPA.

Never heard a peep on 15 meters at all here. The band sounded totally 
dead.

73, Zack W9SZ


On Mon, 3 Nov 2008, Tree wrote:

>
> Ah - the good old days...
>
> You could like tune around on a band and find multipliers that you could
> work with an average station.
>
> I noticed a couple of telling comments from "rare" stations in the CW SS:
>
>> From VO1MP:
>
>> Nice to hear the CW  music ...... still a lot of great ops qrv
>> did cq for a short while , but  my patience with the pileup was stretched a bit
>> so continued to S & P ,
>
> And VY1EI:
>
>> Sunday was better, when I got a run going on 15 meters and I got better at
>> handling pileups. There's no way I can handle 7 callers at once so I would QSY
>> after it was apparent that the spotters knew where I was.
>
> If these guys hadn't gotten the big packet pileups, they probably would have
> worked more guys!!
>
> I had one of these pileups at the end of the contest last year - when I used
> up my operating time and got on with a new callsign at the end of the contest.
> I had a MASSIVE pileup of guys calling me - and I wasn't even a multiplier.
>
> I had this problem once from TI1C in the CQ WW CW contest - where the DLs
> would pounce on me.  I could deal with two or three of them calling (they
> were all really weak on 15 meters) - but then 20 or 30 were calling after I
> got spotted - it was impossible to keep the rate up and I just went back to
> working Ws.
>
> 73 Tree N6TR / W7RM