[SECC] SS Phone 2001

[Bill Coleman]

On 6/20/02 2:13 PM, K4SB at hamcat@directvinternet.com wrote:

>I too hope Bridget will reconsider. I like the CW more than the phone,
>but got zapped also last year. 

Well, we all get zapped somewhat, since everything is checked in greater 
detail.

I was looking at my LCR for SS Phone just now. 

Out of 650 Qs, four were busted calls. Funny, none of them look like 
typos, and I'm pretty certain that I repeated the calls phonetically for 
each person I contacted. So, what is in the log is what I repeated, and 
the other guy failed to correct me. It happens.

I had 6 exchange errors. Five of these were with the Check. One was MN 
instead of MI. That could be a typo.

I had 5 serial number mis-matches and one NIL.

This was a total error rate of 2.5%. Not bad, but could do better.

Conversely, my log found 36 errors in other peoples logs. Most of these 
were check (35 instead of 75) or number errors. 

Interestingly, I didn't have any precedence errors, and only ONE other 
guy had a precedence error (B instead of A).

Moral: Numbers in sweeps rule. Make sure you get them right. Get repeats 
if you are unsure.

>I'd like to pose a question to the group. Would it be considered
>proper conduct to compile a database of both the CW and Phone
>entrants? If enough people contributed their logs ( and I will be more
>than glad to compile the database ) we should have a 95+% chance of
>getting the correct calls. Then, it's a relative simple matter to
>compare your log against the database, and let it pop out calls which
>do not appear. For that matter, it could also do sections and
>precedent.

While there are some pieces of software that have this capability, it 
always seemed periliously close to cheating to me. After all, your log is 
suppose to reflect what you copied, right?

I've used such databases at NQ4I for CQWW and WPX, but it is more of a 
way of making an educated guess about a callsign, which you then confirm 
(or correct). It's not a means of obtaining the exchange. You still have 
to do that over the radio.

>But the important thing is, get on, even if for an hour or so. And
>maybe we need to make up a couple of teams to compete against each
>other. And forget Bill and John being on the same team!!

Yup, participation is the key. John ran up good scores in both modes, 
contributing almost 400,000 points. Bill had a great score in CW, but 
didn't participate in SSB (probably because he was gearing up for CQWW 
CW).

However, if you look at the results closely, we had 15 people participate 
in CW, and 10 on SSB. And few were on both modes: K4BAI, K5OT, W4NTI, 
K2UFT, K9AY, Myself (although I turned in a puny CW score). Seems like 
with a club of our size, we could generate a lot more activity in a 
contest like SS.

We can't just depend on great operators like Bill or John to carry the 
load. We all have to get on the air and try to contribute.

I hope to operate SS Phone full time, and put at least 8 hours into SS 
CW. (This assumes I find gainful employment in the interim....) If we can 
get 25 operators in each mode, we can easily double our total combined 
score.


Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr@arrl.net
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
            -- Wilbur Wright, 1901