[CQ-Contest] CQWW - Excessive Bandwidth

[Rick Kiessig]

I didn't mean to suggest adding WIDE in your log. Just include it as part of
what you tell the other station. Advise, and then move on; no need to wait
for a response (or denial, excuses, etc).

Hearing WIDE from one station is easy to ignore; hearing from a dozen
stations or more, much less so. If I was wide, I would want to know, and I
would take such reports seriously.

I agree that there is also a need to inform contest sponsors, but that can
be a parallel effort. Since we have "X-QSO" records in Cabrillo logs, which
tell the sponsor that the QSO shouldn't be scored, how about a "W-QSO"
record, which says the other side was wide? Would be easy to implement in
software, or could even be added afterwards by hand.

73, Rick ZL2HAM / ZM1G


-----Original Message-----
From: w5gn at mxg.com [mailto:w5gn at mxg.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 2:58 AM
To: 'Rick Kiessig'; cq-contest at contesting.com
Subject: RE: [CQ-Contest] CQWW - Excessive Bandwidth

WIDE or any characters won't work in contests where the exchange is always
numeric, where letters are expected to be cut numbers and not text.

I discovered this in the Ukraine contest this past weekend when I complained
that the cut numbers did not work in that exchange field, only to be
reminded that the UR station's exchange is their character oblast
abbreviation, so cut numbers could not be translated in the exchange field!
Duh!

Barry, EI/W5GN

-----Original Message-----
From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of
Rick Kiessig
Sent: Monday, November 04, 2013 3:24 PM
To: cq-contest at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] CQWW - Excessive Bandwidth

I like the idea of letting the other party know their signal is wide.
However, adding a suffix to the call seems likely to cause headaches when it
comes to things like uploading to LoTW and so on -- as well as potentially
conflicting with existing suffixes.

What about including the word "WIDE" in the exchange? It doesn't happen
often enough (to me, at least) that would affect my rate.

For SWLs or those working assisted, adding the word "WIDE" as a comment on
spots they send out would also be helpful. Contest sponsors could easily
collect spots for the duration of the contest, and search for that keyword.

In fact, both of these could be done outside of contests, as well.

73, Rick ZL2HAM / ZM1G