[CQ-Contest] 3 and 4 letter calls

[Ron Notarius W3WN]

Hi Doug,

50/50, hmmm?  Well what do you know.  For once, my opinion is NOT in the minority!

I understand the reasons for the call's retirement, but am sorry to see it happen.  I can only hope that a "permanent" retirement gets reconsidered down the road, maybe as technology improves.

One has to also wonder... if the RBN and skimmers had technical issues with EE5E, would EE5I, EE5S and/or EE5H suffer from the same issues?

Oh, and speaking of technology, something interesting happened a few days ago.  VP2MSS was active in the contest, and I remember seeing a lot of spots for him.  He was on again Monday evening; but when I put in spot for him, it got rejected (at least by the node I was using at the time - which was the same one during the contest) as an invalid call, the system suggesting that maybe it was VP2MSI that I heard.  This makes me wonder if spots for VP2MSS also suffered a fate like that before & during the contest.  

73, ron w3wn


-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Grant <dougk1dg at gmail.com>
To: CQ Contest <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: Thu, Feb 20, 2020 3:49 pm
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] 3 and 4 letter calls

N3QE said:
“Then there was the world's shortest callsign... EE5E... sent at 50vWPM. Whoevervthought that was good for a contest was nuts.”
But W3WN said:

“Well Tim, I have to disagree with you on the EE5E call. I got a big kick out of that, when it was in use. It certainly stood out, especially after the first time one worked it.”
—
As co-conspirator on that callsign (with EA5RS), I can attest that half the world thought it was the worst call ever and half thought it was the coolest call ever.
However it’s dead and buried now. It turned out that the Skimmers in some multi-multis has issues with intermod products creating random patterns of dits that were interpreted as EE5E on random frequencies. These false spots eventually led most of the clusters to reject all EE5E spots as bogus, resulting in the call never being spotted, even when it was actually on the air.
EA5RS decided that it was a disadvantage in contests to never be spotted and has retired the call.
Sigh.
Doug K1DG


p.s. N2NT says EE5E on CW has the same rhythm as the theme song from the
movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” https://youtu.be/ZTTzcXSLjhI (skip to about
27 seconds in)


p.p.s. Now good luck getting that song/call out of your head.
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