[CQ-Contest] SS and CW contesting

[Steve London]

I have listened to recordings of SS from the 60's and 70's. What strikes 
me is how much slower CW speeds were then. You needed to troll in all of 
those newly-hatched General's, who could copy only slightly more than 13 
WPM. Obviously, this slowed the rate on Saturday, leaving many more 
QSO's to be made on Sunday. If you tried running at 35 WPM, you would 
quickly run out of QSO's.

Fast forward to today. With very few slow speed contesters out there, we 
are working each other at 30-40 WPM, with high rates. No one left to 
work on Sunday.

As a datapoint, the 1968 winner of SS CW was KV4FZ, with 1000 QSO's. The 
QST writeup has some interesting photos - WA5LES (now K5RC), K5YAA 
(still K5YAA !), WA5RTG (now K5GO), WA2CLQ (now K1ZM).

73,
Steve, N2IC

On 11/09/2017 08:18 AM, Bill via CQ-Contest wrote:
> It has now been 10 years since the US went code-free and ham radio license
> numbers are at ALL TIME highs - 750K total, half are general and extra that
> have HF privileges. 30K new techs a year, 10K upgrades a year from tech to
> general/extra. The problem for CW contesting is the number of hams that can
> copy code at 20+ WPM is decreasing and will continue to do so. New hams are
> on SSB/FM/digital. Look at the FT8 band segments on a bandscope. Look at the
> QSO totals in the RTTY contests. Read QST. And MOST importantly look at the
> checks in the last SS.
>
> Looking at the number of submitted logs for a contest doesn't indicate how
> the contest is doing, because it is now so easy to submit a log via web page
> copy and paste. A good indication is for all the ops that put in 22+ hours
> last weekend to ask themselves if they HAD fun and if they look forward to
> putting in 22+ hours next year? Did they feel like they couldn't wait for it
> to end? Were they squirming in their chair the last few hours?
>
> The only significant major contest scoring change I can think of in the last
> 45 years is WPX getting rid of zero point Q's. That's when I started entering
> the WPX. There needs to be some changes in the SS for those of us that still
> operate CW contests. Only 54 stations reported on 3830 operating 24 hours. In
> 2010 there were 125 stations. I don't see anything positive in that trend.
>
> 73, Bill KO7SS  (47 years operating CWSS)
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