[CQ-Contest] Pileup behavior CW

[David Gilbert]

There can be several reasons why those things happen.  A few obvious 
possibilities (in or out of a contest are) are:

a.  QRM/QRN on his end caused the caller to think that you sent his call 
incorrectly or incompletely.  In a contest he probably thinks he's doing 
you a favor by doing that.  If I think you may have copied me as AD7E 
instead of AB7E the log checkers are still going to give me credit for 
the contact ... it's you that will get dinged for a busted callsign if I 
don't correct you.  And if I care enough to call you outside of a 
contest I probably want to make sure I'm in your log correctly for DXCC 
or similar award.

b.  QRM/QRN on his end makes you difficult for the caller to copy you 
and he isn't 100% certain that you came back to him.  By including his 
callsign again he changes the rhythm of the exchange enough so that when 
you send your final acknowledgement (J6xx or TU or dit-dit or whatever) 
he can more likely tell if it was a good QSO.

c.  Many times the LIDs in a pileup are still calling after you have 
come back to someone.  Possibly the caller has noticed that the 
commotion has been causing you to ask for a lot of repeats on previous 
exchanges.  By sending your callsign he adds a few seconds of 
recognizable and mostly unique content for that QRM to potentially die 
down so that you can copy him better with less overall time lost.  
Again, whether true or not in fact, he thinks he's doing you a favor.

d.  Although I don't subscribe to it myself, some folks think that a 
valid contact in any situation requires that the station on either end 
of a QSO must send both callsigns as part of the immediate exchange.

I mean, think about it.  The QRM in Europe is notoriously bad, 
especially on bands like 40m with shorter skip, and you already pointed 
out the problem with brute force callers.  All you have to do is picture 
what it must be like on the other end to get your answers.

Dave   AB7E




W0MU wrote: While in J6 I noticed that many of the European operators 
felt that they needed to send their callsign back even though it was 
copied correctly on our end. This area also felt if necessary to send 
our callsign in many cases. Is there some reason that this is done? This 
was rarely encountered working the US or other areas. I can understand 
sending the call again if I have busted it but sending it again is 
unnecessary and made us wonder if we had been copying the calls wrong. 
We operated split most of the time so it was not a case of not hearing 
their call. We also noticed that this same area was also most prolific 
in trying to brute force contacts by continuous calling and what I would 
deem as other rude behavior. I recall having issue back in the 80's with 
people calling out of turn but it seems far worse today with people 
ignoring the wishes of the DX. The above was most noted outside the 
contest period so maybe this post might be better served on a DX list.