[Mldxcc] Joining NCCC

[Bill Haddon]

Hi Emily,

Great to hear you will be joining NCCC.

Hope you will consider  CW.

re: Absence of Internet for Sweepstakes on a Delta Island: Since five years
ago I don't use any external assistance for contesting; no pre-fills, no
"super check partial". no skimmer, no packet.   Just copy what I hear. My
scores remained good,  my error rate has dropped and the contesting
experience has increased in fun.  Of course many will want to use the
various skimmer, packet and other aids; that's fine, especially for those
with hearing difficulties (a high percentage of those over 50). When
starting out you might consider not getting distracted with these tools and
just concentrate on doing the contest.   For the ARRL Sweepstakes, in
almost all of the 83 ARRL Sections (for CW at least) the record scores are
higher for those who operate in the non-assisted class (i.e. A^B vs. U).
It is a surprising result.

An illustration of what can go wrong:  Late in CQP on 10m SSB while looking
for a clear freq to call,  I called a CQ'ing station..  As we completed the
QSO,  a voice rang out "Lake county HELP  UP 5 please".. so I went up 5 and
called cq.  The station, an 8 in Ohio, came back grateful for his 57th
mult. . but wait. . WriteLog reported three previous QSO's. . What gives?
Turned out the W8 made an error on our first QSO, entering "LANG" instead
of "LAKE"  then propagated the same error over *three more QSO's* cw and
SSB, not listening to what I was sending or saying!*  There were few or no
other stns from Lake county -- thus he would have lost almost 3 percent of
his score [mult missed and 3 deducted QSO's]

*This  W8 was not a casual participant. . his QSO number was around 450.

73  Bill n6zfo



On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Emily Clarke <n1did at comcast.net> wrote:

> On 10/7/2014 12:55 AM, Bill Haddon wrote:
>
>> Not necessary for joining:  Here's the recipe:
>>
>> .....
>>
>
> Done!  I've also put in the FCC application to change my callsign to
> N6DID.  That will probably make things less confusing in the future.
>
> Emily
>