[CQ-Contest] SS and CW contesting

[John Geiger]

Steve,

Are any of these recordings available on-line?  They would be pretty neat
to hear.  The first contest I ever participated in (other than field day)
was the 1981 November Sweepstakes.  I was a novice at the time, so I was
limited to the novice bands, and only got on for the end of the contest, as
my parents had grounded me for most of the weekend.  However, contesters in
the novice bands would send much slower to encourage the novices.  Nowadays
the novice bands, which is were novices and techs would be limited to in
the CW SS, are the same as the general CW bands, with all of their high
speeds.  If we want to encourage newer hams to try CW contesting, maybe we
need to set aside a portion of those 4 bands (80, 40, 15, 10) where
operators will send slower and new contesters will know that is the place
to get on and feel welcomed to CW contesting.

73 John AF5CC

On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Steve London <n2icarrl at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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