Topband: Fw: Use of Remote Receivers During 160 Meter Contests

[Jim Brown]

On Tue,3/17/2015 9:44 AM, mstangelo at comcast.net wrote:
> Classical 160 meter operating involves real estate and the expenditure of lots of money or time for effective transmitting and receiving antenna systems and amplifiers. This is accomplished mostly by old men with lots of spending money and time on their hands, kind of like the Olympic games.

Exactly right.

> How can younger people or those without the resources participate in these endeavors? They came up with the X-games instead of the Olympics. Hams are starting to use the newer technology to enhance their radio experience.
>
> I am one of those old men how is presently busy with work but retirement is on the horizon. I have an acre property now but my wife and I will probably downsize once our mixing product leaves the nest. If you asked me a decade ago I would preach the classical operator model but now I will take advantage of the new technology to allow me to operate in the future.
>
> Both methods have to co-exist or else the hobby will die. They should have additional categories for remote receiving or operating in contests and awards chasing.

Exactly right again.  As an OT, ham since age 14 (1955), I'm about ten 
years ahead of you in the retirement game, with 8 acres of woods.  I'm 
limited in what I can work by the RX noise of distant stations, and even 
here, with my nearest neighbors 500 ft from my antennas, I'm 
increasingly limited by their noise.  I've got grow lights to the NE 
(EU) and a big solar installation at the border of my property (SE).

Any model for the future that does not allow "Joe Ham" to somehow escape 
his increasingly noisy RF environment WILL lead to death of the hobby.  
The key is to make the rule(s) reasonable for reasonable people.  The 
Stew Perry rule seems to be in the ballpark for individual contesters. I 
fully appreciate the technical challenges for multi-ops, and agree that 
for contest stations, TX and RX ought to be limited to a single site. 
And I strongly support remotely operated multi-ops, such as the recent 
operation that began this discussion a month or so ago, and that they 
ought to be treated as any other multi-op.

73, Jim K9YC