[CQ-Contest] Makrothen - An Exercise In Frustration

[ko7ss at yahoo.com]

This is a great contest scoring format, who doesn't like 10K point Q's?

Maybe the 3 separate time blocks are confusing to the casual op? The
24 hour Saturday 1200Z - Sunday 1200Z contests seem easier to focus
on for me.

All of contesting is suffering from a relatively fixed number of participants,
most of which can be worked quickly in a short time using CQing and
clicking on bandmap spots. This is worse in RTTY contests, which
generally allow Skimmer use across all entry classes. I got on for the
last 2 hours and made 102 Q's on 20M in 2 hours, it was good fun!

The poster child for this theory is the CW SS coming up in a few weeks.
Sure the number of "entrants" submitting a log is stable or up, mainly
because it takes <2 minutes to generate a Cab file and upload it. The
club competition encourages it and this is good, but someone needs to
look at the number of distinct callsigns reported as worked (by more
than say 25 stations) from year to year.

The PL259 group needs to expand to a CW contest sometime in the
CW contest void between mid Feb (ARRL DXCW) --> late May (CWWPX).
Certainly something could be squeezed into this 14 week time frame?
They already have the log submission/checking in place, with a fast
result turnaround. Do it!

73, Bill KO7SS in Arizona