[CQ-Contest] Wasting Time

[George Fremin III]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 11:56:53AM -0700, al_lorona at agilent.com wrote:

> Most of these statements are highly ironic. To see why, tune in to
> the last few hours of any contest, when stations can go several
> minutes on a frequency calling CQ without an answer but keep pushing
> the button anyway. I'm in no way begruding their right to call CQ;
> I'm saying that if you add up all of the precious seconds "wasted"
> by those of us that say "please" or "QSL" or whatever, that "wasted"
> time doesn't even come close to the time you spend sitting on a
> quiet frequency looking for those last few contacts.

> In other words, most stations are not time-limited in most contests,
> they are 'finding-another-Q' limited.

While in general I want to agree with you - I also know that every
chance I have to make more contacts faster at the start of the contest
or whenever for that matter is more time I have to work another
station at some other point in the contest.

Contests have a finite amount of time in them - when the contest is
over is is over.  You can never get any of that time back - every
second that ticks by is a second that you can never make up.

At any point in the contest when you have stations waiting to work you
if you take to long to make a contact they will likely tune to the
next station - this is a lost contact and there is no way to say that
you will make that contact later. Indeed you don't know if the band
will be open to that station at another point in the contest etc.

The contest for me where I think about this a lot - maybe way too much
- is the phone sweepstakes.  In the phone SS rates above 150 an hour
are very hard to maintain. 150 an hour is an average of 2.5 contacts
per minute for an hour.

If you can manage 3 contacts per minute you will have a 180 hour. This
means a full exchange of information every 20 seconds.  In phone SS
this is really hard to do - and it does not take many slow exchanges
to turn your 180 hour into a 150 hour. So in order to have a 180 hour
you need to have many minutes when the rate is more than 3 contacts an
minute. And every time an extra thing is said or an extra fill is
needed on either side you can really feel the time slipping away.  It
might seem like a small thing but if it takes 10 seconds longer to
make a contact every minute your 180 hour becomes a 120 hour.

It is for this reason that a station really trying to make a big score
is so worried about wasted time.

I (no surprise) think this is a valid thing.  No matter how many
unanswered CQs there might be later in the contest.  Or how many there
might be during the 180 hour.

Here is a recording of a 179 contact hour in phone SS:

http://www.k5tr.net/audio/contests/SS/SSB/2004/2004_K5TR_ss_ssb_2004-11-21_00:00.mp3

Maybe there are some slow minutes in there and you can get a feel for 
how long they seem.

-- 
George Fremin III - K5TR
geoiii at kkn.net
http://www.kkn.net/~k5tr