[CQ-Contest] NCJ Article RE: Sweepstakes Change Suggestions

[W0MU Mike Fatchett]

I chase counties and we had a large group of SSB ops start to try CW.  
They started slow, made lots of mistakes, but after time many of them 
have gotten much much better.  Would any of them call into to a station 
sending 30 wpm plus.  Nope.  Would they if you were sending 15 to 
20........Maybe if they were encouraged.   There are lots of people 
chasing all kinds of awards with counties or grids or states, etc that 
would live to work you.  They are just not going to be blown away at 
high speed.

I don't thing forcing people to learn CW or operate that mode made much 
impact on the CW bands in the past.  I think they are more crowded today 
than ever.  It used to be you could work DX on RTTY and CW as there were 
far less people to deal with.  That is not the case anymore with either 
mode.

We don't do a good job at nurturing new CW ops along.  I am not even 
sure the best way to nurture them other than education and trying to 
slow down.  I thing the Novice Roundup is gone as that was the one 
contest a Novice or Tech could get into where they were target audience 
and could get the taste of what contesting is and many more experienced 
contesters would get on and hand out contacts.    Is this something that 
can be recaptured?  Would it help?

W0MU


On 3/19/2018 11:33 AM, Bill via CQ-Contest wrote:
> Lots of common sense in this post.
>
>
> The main problem remains.  CW is a dying art and the FCC put that concept in high gear with no-code licenses.  People no longer have to, and most don't want to learn the code.  It's as simple as that.  If  you compare the checks in your logs you'll see lots of 2010-2017 for SSB but a much lower number for the CW.
>
>
> Bill  KH7XS/K4XS
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: W0MU Mike Fatchett <w0mu at w0mu.com>
> To: cq-contest <cq-contest at contesting.com>; cac-i <cac-i at reflector.arrl.org>
> Sent: Mon, Mar 19, 2018 3:51 pm
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] NCJ Article RE: Sweepstakes Change Suggestions
>
> I don't receive the NCJ so I have not read the article.  What I gather is that most people feel that the SSB part of the contest is ok but the CW part is not.  If most people feel that SSB fine the way it is, are people suggesting we make sweeping changes to fix the CW portion and then possibly breaking both?The exchange is long.  It makes the contest different.  This is good.  As stated by many we have plenty of rate contests where copying is not part of the contest.I have heard of lots of ideas but none of them really address the issue which is getting more people involved on the CW side.  Their are plenty of people trying CW or are proficient enough at slower speeds.    Most of the ideas allow more contacts from the same participants on other bands or by using other callsigns.    The reason the radio/callsign rules were put in place as I understand it, that when the club competitions were fierce, I don't thing they are as much any more, people would use other calls and onl
>   y work their club members.  I get that.  Good for them, but not good for the overall health of the contest.  I am sure people still do it, tough to catch.  SO2R changed much of contesting, tough to put it back in the black box.Is the CW solution a simple as slowing down and encouraging new or less competent cw ops to want to call you or is the goal to run at 45wpm and work nobody and listen to endless CQ's?  Will slowing down even help?   Maybe the ARRL needs to print some articles on encouraging people to try SS CW and explaining it better?The last couple hours of SS can be pretty fun.  Many people get on just for that period.Who are we fixing the contest for?  The top 50  or 100 that are the real competitors or are we making it fun and better for all?What we could be doing is breaking down the classes and putting the SO2 elite ops in one category and then trying to figure out how to put the rest in appropriate categories so we can do a better job at acknowledging them and
>   creating competition with similar stations and skills.NAQP is great for 12 hours.  How would it be for 24 hours.  I would suggest that it would get pretty slow on CW.  You can always milk SSB contacts on open bands.   Maybe the NAQP folks should give a 24 hour contest a try and see how it goes.  NAQP has been around a long time now if it was be so great, why has it never been tried?Changing for the sake of change is not a good idea.   Is the contest really broke?  I don't think so.  Could it be improved?  Maybe. Could we make it worse? easily!  Making large changes would change what the contest is.  I don't think that is a good idea.W0MU_______________________________________________CQ-Contest mailing listCQ-Contest at contesting.comhttp://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
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