[CQ-Contest] ARRL November SS is OK for the small station

[steve.root at culligan4water.com]

Ria, 

If you really want to become a good CW operator, then I might suggest you consider ragchewing. You really can't improve your CW skills in a contest, especially if you're using keyboard and macros to do all the heavy lifting. However if you're in the middle of a ragchew you have to be able to send manually and then copy whatever comes your way. I think you would be amazed at the number of contesters that aren't capable of holding up their end in a ragchew. However the best CW operators have no problem with it at all.

73 Steve K0SR

-----Original Message-----
From: rjairam at gmail.com [mailto:rjairam at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 12:18 PM
To: sawyered at earthlink.net
Cc: 'CQ-Contest Reflector'
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] ARRL November SS is OK for the small station

My take - I am not a very good CW operator by any means.The long exchange at high speed is frightening to me. I am afraid Iwill mess up and I can't realistically run SS on CW. I think thisscares off a lot of people. I can do a callsign copying contest likeARRL DX or CQWW just fine. I won't do as well as I do on SSB contestsbut I can place top 10 or near to it. I gather for many who aren'tbrought up in the CW tradition that they aren't really having a goodtime struggling to copyHowever, the solution to this is not to shorten the exchange.The solution is to get more people practicing copying SS typeexchanges. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but I havebegun to copy more of the ARRL code practice and others. This way myCW can get better and I can then do serious effort SS.How do we do this on a large scale?Now we have the ARRL saying that techs need to be enticed to upgradeby giving them more PHONE privileges. Techs have full CW privileges(at 200 watts) on General sub-bands on 80, 40, 15 meters. Why aren'twe encouraging more techs to try CW? The impression I get is that CWis treated as a hurdle, an obstacle, rather than a new fun mode totry.73Ria, N2RJOn Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:10 AM, Ed Sawyer  wrote:> Interesting data about log submissions for SS.>>>> CW logs received - 2008 (bottom of cycle) - 1417>>>> CW logs received - 2017 (just released) - 1275>>>> SSB logs received - 2008 - 1870>>>> SSB logs received - 2016 (latest available) - 1626>>>> Virtually every other major contest is growing - significantly - over the> past 10 and 20 years. SS has been in decline steadily on CW for a decade> (sunspots or not) and SSB was pretty steady until last year's 200 log drop.> It will be interesting to see 2017.>>>> Likely, there are an increasing number of SSB casuals just working some> activity that don't submit a log and very few on the CW side (my opinion).>>>> The CW problem seems terminal in my opinion for this contest only. No other> HF contest has such a poor trend that I can find.>>>> SSB can probably stay interesting if enough casuals are willing to figure> out the exchange.>>>> I don't see how changing the times does anything other than make some people> frustrated - helping no one needing any help - and CW SS can hardly afford> for any of the faithful to call it quits.>>>> 73>>>> Ed N1UR (no dog in this fight - just getting some data out there)>>>>>> _______________________________________________> CQ-Contest mailing list> CQ-Contest at contesting.com> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest_______________________________________________CQ-Contest mailing listCQ-Contest at contesting.comhttp://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest