[CQ-Contest] VHF Contest - Self Spotting

[Ed Sawyer]

“The changes will permit assistance in arranging contacts, but not in conducting contacts. They will, for example, allow a station to announce its location in a chat room, on a repeater, or even via e-mail.” – From the ARRL Rules Change

 

Seems to me that the QSOs need to stay entirely possible after the announcing of its “station location”.  What does that mean actually?  Frequency and grid square and callsign?  So the only thing left to exchange is the “other guy’s” info.  Right?   There is no allowance in the rules for spotting “W1VE I am calling you from grid square FN34 - do your hear me? – N1UR” is there?

 

Lets hope those hard QSOs stay hard, the right way, regardless of how much enthusiasm for increasing VHF activity there is.

 

N1UR

 

From: Gerry Hull [mailto:gerry at yccc.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 2:58 PM
To: Edward Sawyer; CQ-Contest
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] VHF Contest - Self Spotting

 

Ed, you missed the memo.

 

http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-board-okays-changes-to-dxcc-program-vhf-and-above-contesting-rules

 

I've been doing VHF contests at a very high level for almost 30 years.   Some QSOs have been next to impossible without

some kind of non-ham-related liason.    The main reason they are allowing this is because they want MORE

activity on VHF, UHF and uW...   use it or loose it.   We shall see if the experiment works.

 

As I've told many -- much of the data being exchanged on the internet is meta data about stations -- it is not QSOs.

It just enhances the possibility of a contact.  And in VHF and above, making the contact is much harder than tuning the band to find someone.

 

73, Gerry W1VE

One of the W2SZ contest team (www.mgef.org)

 

 

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Ed Sawyer <sawyered at earthlink.net> wrote:

I must have "missed the memo" on this one if there was ever any dialog
concerning this.  Anyone else think this is just a bad idea?



How is the self-spotting not going to turn into - QSO's over the internet
pretty quickly.  It seems to me that if the ARRL wants to have a contest
this way, someone out to be "monitoring" to keep the QSO' at least legit.



It will be interesting to see if this gets quickly out of hand.



I know that VHF contests can become boring.  But there are other ways to
fight the boredom.  Watching baseball as you hit F1 comes to mind.



Ed  N1UR

_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest at contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest