[CQ-Contest] NAQP Rules

[Tim Shoppa]

I find it interesting how the "zero beat" argument has swung over my short
(OK getting close to 40 years) time as a ham.

When I was a kid, Novices were crystal bound and everyone tuned up and down
5 or more kc looking for a reply and there was no expectation of zero
beating.

Today there are folks who tell me they use a SDR with 50Hz filters on CW
and unless I zero beat them exactly indeed they do not hear me coming back
to their CQ.
And there are tools built in to many rigs (I'm familiar with the K3 but
other rigs have similar tools) to help folks zero beat that precisely.

Rather than have contest newbies go assisted S&P NAQP when they run out of
easily heard signals, I would rather see them CQ on a frequency. NAQP is
far and away the place to learn what it is like to run a frequency and
doing so also makes them them better at S&P (including that you do not want
to zero beat everyone in a pileup!)

I don't think there are many folks doing assisted in NAQP: The "spotted on
the cluster" rush when I'm running just isn't there, not like it is in a
contest where assisted is a category. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing to
show up in the last hours of sweepstakes as fresh meat and run 150 stations
with only a single CQ! Yes, sometimes I get multiple callers, and sometimes
they are zero beat, but the "just spotted" rush simply isn't there in NAQP,
I think the number of simultaneous replies to a NAQP CQ can probably be
shown to be simple Poisson distributions.

Tim N3QE


> Let's be a little more careful about the word "cheaters" and the NAQP. A
> number of times, I had 3-4 stations calling simultaneously, all exactly
> zero-beat to each other. That is a "signature" of clicking on a spot.
> None of these callers were what I would characterize as top-tier, or
> even top-50 NAQP competitors. They were simply folks getting on the air
> in a fun contest for a few hours. They probably think that every contest
> has an assisted category.
>
>