[CQ-Contest] possible changes for CQ VHF Contest

[Jim Brown]

On 7/23/2019 10:36 AM, Courtney Judd wrote:
> hello Dennis, I enjoyed your email and think it was spot on. I don't use 
> ft8/4 and don't think they should be allowed .... maybe they should have 
> their own contests.

I could make the same argument for stations east of the Mississippi 
River -- they should have their own contest, because there are so many 
of them. I operated full time, 6M only, with 1.5 kW and 4-el at 120 ft. 
I made 61 Qs in 38 grids. The only prop I had east of Denver was STX.

It's unfortunate that some have a prejudice against digital modes, 
feeling that "they're not real radio," forgetting that contesting is a 
LOT more than what the guy does while sitting in front of it. Station 
building is at least as important as that.

As to mindless -- how is FT8 contesting any different from RTTY 
contesting? And how could CW contesting be more mindless than assisted 
operation during CQWW? And unassisted is only slightly less so -- for 
stations in most of the world, all you have to do is copy the call!

And as to 160M -- I have a pretty good antenna farm for both RX and TX 
on that band, but I went four years without hearing EU stations on CW! 
This season I heard four (during a contest) and only one could hear me. 
Me with legal limit and quarter-wave vertical with a reflector giving me 
gain in that direction! But also during this past season, I worked about 
20 EU stations on FT8, including ten new entities.

CW has been my favorite mode since 1956, and it always will be. I enjoy 
it most, and it has a signal to noise advantage of 10 dB or so over SSB, 
which is my un-favorite mode. But FT8 has a 10 dB advantage over CW with 
great ops on both ends of the QSO. AND, more important for VHF, it has a 
20dB advantage over SSB, which puts grids on the air from stations where 
the op doesn't know CW. For those of us chasing grids, that's a VERY big 
deal!

Oh, BTW -- there's a lot of operator skill and knowledge involved in FT8 
operation, because the operator must know about propagation, make 
decisions about when to be on, where to point the antenna, which antenna 
to use, and so on. And, like most of ham radio, it's also about timing.

73, Jim K9YC