Topband: Contest conditions

[Tree]

I was also struck with one station who was calling lots of CQs with no
answer - with the word "TEST" at the end about 10 WPM faster than the rest
of the transmission.  Nothing like changing your speed to help someone who
is having a hard time hearing you figure out what is going on. :-)

Reminds me of a story I have shared perhaps before...  it's almost hard to
believe this is true - but I was there.  Back in about 1975 - when I was
living with WB6VZI (now N6VI) I strung up a very low dipole on 160 meters
and this is when VS6DO was pretty active.  One station (I forget who) was
having a tough time getting through the noise - and was going back and
forth trying to get their callsign across.  They got so determined - that
they eventually sent their call phonetically - on CW!!  Wow.

The other morning - I had a weak JA call me - and I had all but one letter
of their callsign.   When they tried again - they sent the missing letter
about 4 or 5 times - and quickly got in the log.

There are good ways and bad ways to deal with noise.  My personal
experience is something in the mid 20's works pretty well for code speed -
and certainly not sending at different speeds or superfluous information.

Tree N6TR

PS: Stew Perry is less than 3 weeks away!!

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Mike Waters <mikewate at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, we can look forward to the ARRL 160 and the Stew Perry, where the
> average speed is considerably slower.
>
> 73 Mike
> www.w0btu.com
>
> > One problem I frequently encountered was DX stations sending CW way too
> > fast. When a station is just out of the noise with fast QSB, as many
> > frequently are, they're really hard to copy if they're going 45 wpm,
> _________________
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>