[TOEC] SAC versus CQ SA SSB CONTEST

[Mats Strandberg]

 Hello all Nordic Contesters!

As hopefully most of you already are aware of, SAC SSB was moved from the
4th weekend in September to the 2nd weekend in October. The reason was that
we noticed that SAC SSB did not grow in the same way that SAC CW did. The
explanation for this was the more and more popular CQ WW RTTY Contest the
same weekend as the SAC SSB weekend.

We carefully analyzed which weekend would be the best one - and we found
that the second weekend in October was without any major SSB contest.

WA7BNM and SM3CER Contest Calendars have shown this new weekend for SAC
SSB for several months.

All of a sudden, a few days ago, a completely "new star" appeared on the
sky....  Namely a South American World-wide 48 hour SSB contest the same
weekend and ours (October 9th-10th).

We have nothing against a new South American contest, BUT the selection of
weekend is highly unfortunate!

The contest is a standard "All work all contest" with serial numbers. Huge
risk of confusion and Cross Contest contacts. The Brazilians realize that
the date is not 100% well chosen, and now start heavy marketing and also
emails to Scandinavians that we may send logs to this new contest CQ SA SSB
just by changing category...

I would like to ask all stations in Scandinavia to FOCUS on our own contest,
by using the phrase "CQ SCANDINAVIAN CONTEST" when we work next weekend. In
this way, we show the world that we are proud of our own 52 years old
contest and not ready to substitute it or enter it into a new Brasilian
invention.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND IN ANY LOGS TO CQ SA SSB Contest!  Only work SAC as
always. Try to make sure that the contacts you work between 12-12 UTC on
October 9th-10th belong to the Scandinavian Activity Contest!

In this way, we show the world that we are PROUD of our own contest and that
we are not giving in to join this contest with a brand new invention that
all of a sudden appeared on the same date as OUR contest!

Looking forward to meeting you in SAC 2010 - only!

73 de R3/SM6LRR, Mats