Topband: A way forward to keep 'old school' modes vibrant alongside FT-8? (long)

[Dave AA6YQ]

>>>AA6YQ comments below

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark K3MSB [mailto:mark.k3msb at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 1:28 PM
To: Dave AA6YQ
Cc: topBand List
Subject: Re: Topband: A way forward to keep 'old school' modes vibrant alongside FT-8? (long)

You can’t retract any awards,  and I don’t believe you even have to worry about that.

>>>I'm not personally worried, Mark. As I said, none of my DXCC or Challenge award credits were made with K1JT modes. I was referring to the impact on award recipients who included K1JT modes in their submissions over the past several years.

Let’s say you have 150 Confirmed on 160M right now using a combination of SSB, CW, FT8 etc.   The current single band award would not change – it’s “Mixed” by default.   I would envision 3 new awards to come into existence --  160M-SSB,  160M-CW, and 160M-FT8.

As I mentioned before,  once you have the software written for one mode specific band award (ex:  160M-CW),

>>>Extending DXCC to include band-mode combinations would have large implications for the award program. Why just for 160m, as you propose above? From the other extreme, many ops complain about pileup congestion caused by award chasers seeking new entity-bands for DXCC Challenge; adding entity-band-modes would make this worse.

  then it’s a simple extension to add –SSB, -FT8, -AM, -PSK31, -Digital etc  (unless you really bolloxed up the architectural stage of the software design).      The ability to easily add new band/mode combinations will be essential to facilitate new modes that will be available in the future.    Like I posted before, it’s not rocket science to get this done.

>>>Given the context, it's not obvious why you're focusing on software, but if you're referring to DXLab, which I develop and maintain, it has long supported the pursuit of WAZ awards, which do support a full matrix of zones, bands, and modes. I'll extend DXLab to support whatever the ARRL and the other primary award sponsors do, as I (and other logging application developers) have done for many years.

>>>A  "level playing field" issue that ops have raised is that some have labored a lifetime to achieve Honor Roll on RTTY, only to have the ARRL "dilute" this by accepting digital modes that make it "easier" to work DX: PSK, Olivia, JT65, and now FT8. There's a similar issue with Mixed awards for particularly challenging bands like 160m and 6m. Adding new mode-specific awards avoids the "retraction" issue that would occur if the ARRL were to redefine the 160m DXCC awards and endorsements to exclude FT8, or redefine the DXCC Digital awards and endorsements to exclude FT8 - but adding new mode-specific awards doesn't address the "dilution of my lifelong effort" issue. 

        73,

                 Dave, AA6YQ