[RTTY] Fw: Farewell from K1TTT

[Rudy Bakalov]

This is a sad day for contesting.

Rudy N2WQ
--- On Fri, 2/18/11, K1TTT <K1TTT at ARRL.NET> wrote:

From: K1TTT <K1TTT at ARRL.NET>
Subject: Farewell from k1ttt
To: "YCCC" <yccc at yccc.org>, "Getscores" <getscores at googlegroups.com>, N1MMLogger at yahoogroups.com
Date: Friday, February 18, 2011, 6:39 AM

Just over 27 years ago I moved to Peru and was introduced to contesting by
K1RQ.  One of the first people I met at one of my first YCCC meetings was
K1AR.  I have always looked up to John over the years as he won contest
after contest and always seemed to be working for the betterment of ham
radio and contesting.  He had a long run as contest columnist for cq, and
did many other things that made me look up to him and those around him as
great operators and inspirations.  

I worked building and improving this station, recruiting operators, learning
about propagation, pushing for new technology in contesting.  I was in on
the first tests of using packet radio for dx spotting, wrote my own software
to extend the first packet spotting network into wma/eny, adapted ct to be a
multi-user logging system with an array of dumb terminals and later provided
a tool to network ct over ethernet.  Recently I have been working with the
CW Skimmer software and a new AR-Cluster version to better integrate the
world wide RBN data into the station here... I even have a bag of memory
bought just last week to upgrade the logging computers just sitting here.  

I have also been working for years to bring real time visibility into
contesting.  I have always felt that this is one of the big missing links of
contesting.  Traditionally contesters close their doors Friday night,
operate in their own little world, maybe hearing serial numbers from
competitors in some contests, but usually not... Then they might try to
listen in on 3830 to find out where they stood in the claimed scores, and
finally wait 8, 9, or 10 months for the final results.  I felt it would be
much more interesting if there were real time scores available, after all,
how many sporting events are there where spectators and even amateur
participants, can't see who the leader is, or know how far ahead or behind
they are?  The first drafts of the specification were published by wa7bnm in
2005, I ran a test site on my web server for a bit.  We ran some tests using
n1mm logger, got some other loggers to add the capability, got support from
ky1v to provide a real web server and bandwidth, and have been working to
get more participation.  Even though it got off to a rocky start, the next
step of real time log entry was an offshoot of this and hopefully will
become a future draw for the internet savvy upcoming contesters.

All the time I was chasing the likes of w3lpl, n2rm, then later k3lr and
kc1xx... Over a period of time in the 80's or early 90's we were able to
beat w3lpl on each band at least once, just never all on the same weekend.
But I always felt that there was room at the top an some day I would put
together the right combination of hardware, software, and operators to make
it there.  I have hosted many single operators and other groups who wanted
to try out contesting with big aluminum.  

I can't count how many hams I have introduced to contesting over the years,
I just hope they never have a let-down like I just had.  Wednesday morning I
received an email from K1AR.. As I said, someone who I have always
considered a pillar of the contesting community and someone I looked up to.
He was writing in his role as a moderator of the cq-contest email reflector.
I normally wouldn't make a private message like this public, but I think
those of you who have been here and known me for all these years needed to
understand how this affected me more, and his own words are the best.  The
email went like this:

"I'd like to ask a favor. As you know, while I don't personally support the
real time scores concept (as is the case for most of the major competitors),
I urge you to press forward and do encourage your investment in the concept.

 
Looking forward, can I ask that you begin to consolidate your postings on
the subject, perhaps on a monthly basis or something similar? A weekly
update is becoming a bit too much, especially considering the post only
applies to a very small percentage of CQ-Contest's subscribers when looking
at active real-time scores participation over the past year.
 
Thanks in advance the consideration and GL this weekend!"

In just one paragraph he has both condemned a project that I thought had
pretty broad support and would some day attract enough interest to get
'major competitors' interested in joining in, and elevated himself and
unamed others into their own 'major competitors' class which looked down on
my work as nothing but noise that should be squelched so they didn't even
have to delete the messages from their in-boxes.  The utter arrogance of his
approach to this just totally deflated me and pulled the rug out from under
everything I have been working on for all these years.  And it totally
changed my image of someone I thought would have encouraged advances like
that instead of trying to squash them.

I'm not sure where I'll go from here, I already had operators committed for
this weekend and had the food already in the fridge, so this operation will
go on... But I don't know about the future.  Maybe I'll take up traffic
handling or go sort 27 years of qsl cards to apply for dxcc or just host
guest ops... But my heart just isn't in it right now.


David Robbins K1TTT
e-mail: mailto:k1ttt at arrl.net
web: http://www.k1ttt.net
AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://dxc.k1ttt.net