[CQ-Contest] Skimmer had finally arrived

[Ron Notarius W3WN]

Pete,
I don't know if it was because of Skimmer spots, or increased use of Packet, or what...
But I did observe, especially on Sunday, that if there was a decent pileup on a station, especially if we saw the call on the cluster within the last 10-15 minutes, that if I simply set my XIT a touch high, and I do mean just a touch, we broke the pileup most of the time in 2 - 3 calls. And I know from the calls I recognized that many of those calling were running power and/or beams, not 100 W barefoot to a vertical like we were.
So in light of what you said, it seems like that a slight offset can make a huge difference.
73, ron w3wn


On 02/20/12, Pete Smith N4ZR wrote:

Thanks, all, for the kind words. We did have a little trouble with one 
of our Telnet servers late Saturday morning, but some quick CPR by Dave, 
KM3T got it running again. The spot volume was nothing like CQWW, but 
we did hit peaks of 1300 spots per minute at times, which is still 
pretty amazing.

As one who is complicit in this minor revolution, I felt occasionally as 
if I was hoist by my own petard. I would find myself a run frequency, 
call CQ a couple of times, and get a solid wall of sound for my reward. 
It was really hard to pick out even fragments of callsigns. I've run at 
high rates before - 150 QSO hours in CQWW over the years - and I coped 
all right, but it did seem to me that zero-beat callers were much more 
common than last year, for example. Of course, DX spots are only posted 
to an accuracy of 0.1 KHz, so if people simply click on a spot, and ten 
or fifteen do this at once, then it's all one big mosh pit.

In an effort to improve the productivity of my S&P endeavors with 
Skimmer spots this weekend, I made a point of tweaking my main tuning by 
50-100 Hz after jumping on a spot, before calling. I seemed to get 
through fairly well doing this, and I certainly noticed that when I was 
running and the mosh pit effect was going on, I could easily pick out 
stations that were operating a bit off the consensus frequency.

Just a thought ... everybody wins if you tune a bit first after jumping 
on a spot.

73, Pete N4ZR
The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at www.conteststations.com
The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000 and
arcluster.reversebeacon.net, port 7000


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