[CQ-Contest] CQ WPX RTTY and assistance

[Tim Shoppa]

I jumped into the deep end of CQ WPX this past weekend in fact not
even reading the rules before I started (I know, silly of me.)

I used "assistance" in the form of both reversebeacon skimmer spots
and also fiddled with multi-channel decoding (FLDigi in a separate
window) at times. (Side note... it's not obvious that I was using
FLDigi's multi-channel decoder effectively, but just having a
waterfall up made it easy to help me identify some CQ's which were not
registering with reversebeacon. Oh, man, some of those guys' CQ and
exchange macros were just painfully long and filled with useless
punctuation rather than actual contest exchange info, like say calls
and serial numbers. I mean when the element of your exchange I want to
hear is just the serial number, but instead you have 50 other
characters in your macro (including my name!) and you only have your
serial appearing once in your message, hint hint, that's not an
effective way to give a fill.)

Am I correct in reading the rules after the contest, that there is no
differentiation between assisted and non-assisted for RTTY WPX? That's
an interesting decision to help encourage activity in a RTTY contest
(where, unless someone is still using a Model 28 in the contest,
everyone is using computers anyway.) And I think it paid off... I was
hearing huge serial numbers out there, from folks who were obviously
fishing deep on multiple bands, indicating a huge amount of activity,
and as I was running on Sunday I was getting new callers giving me
very low serial numbers, indicating lots of dabblers, which is great.

I note that some of the other regional EU CW contests have recently
opened up to allow skimming and I think this is great to help folks
"fish deeper" for little fry and encourage more activity, in contests
that might kinda slow down towards the end otherwise.

Tim N3QE