[CQ-Contest] Rapid CQ's - was Need advice re amps/setups for contesting

[David Gilbert]

I agree that it is frustrating, but I can think of at least two reasons 
why that kind of thing more or less legitimately happens:

1.  The guy you are calling has lots of QRM on his end.  Even if he 
can't hear callers for a while it can be important for him to keep a 
consistent pace so that callers know when to call him.  Some of the very 
worst pileup management I have ever seen is by DX stations who don't 
maintain a reasonably quick and very consistent pace.  People call 
almost randomly and nobody in the pileup knows when to call or when to 
shut up.

2.  A station trying to run in a major contest often risks losing his 
frequency if he stops very long to listen for a weak reply.  I ALWAYS 
try to dig out the weak ones, but I cringe every time I have to listen 
much longer than normal to do so.  Almost invariably some lid looking 
for an open frequency will just plop down on top of me and start calling 
CQ if I'm not constantly staking my claim to it.  Sad, but true, and it 
can take a lot of time to recover control of the frequency ... during 
which I'm mostly not making QSO's.

I agree that it is frustrating to have a strong station keep calling CQ 
in your face, but I've learned to understand how it can happen and I 
typically just store his callsign in the bandmap and check back later.  
During S&P excursions on 20m and 15m this past weekend, I twice had it 
happen where a station in Europe kept calling CQ only to tell me I was 
the strongest signal he'd heard when I finally worked him.  He didn't 
suddenly get louder so it wasn't propagation that changed all of a 
sudden, but something on his end did.

73,
Dave   AB7E




Zack Widup wrote:
> I don't have too many "pet peeves" in contesting, but one of them is the
> station/operator who calls CQ and by the time I've said/sent my call once in
> response, they're well into another CQ. And I have a short callsign! Are
> people only listening for signals that will blow their front ends out? How
> can you only listen for 2 seconds before calling CQ again?
> I usually only bother about 4 times with that and then I go elsewhere
> when doing S&P.
>
> 73, Zack W9SZ
>
>