[UK-CONTEST] Frequencies

[Paul Higginson]

In message <002301c4fcd9$ff59e240$89e536d2 at christran>, Chris Tran ZL1CT 
<zl1ct at gm7v.com> writes

> I am not condoning deliberate QRM or frequency
>stealing,

And I wasn't whinging about it either....

In fact part of the reason for mentioning the deliberate qrm that I 
experienced was to "test the water" to see what the consensus of opinion 
is.

When I lost "my" frequencies both times on Saturday, it was because I 
made a conscious decision that to try and fight it out would be counter 
productive for two reasons

1 it would unnecessarily raise my blood pressure

2 My rate was stuffed to nil, my opponent seemed able to work though our 
mutual qrm

so I might have re gained my frequency but it would probably have taken 
me so long that I'd have lost out long term, my decision.

As far as I can see from listening to people who do well in this test, 
to run is to win, so my decision might have been flawed. Based on that I 
might think differently next time.



> others will ask themselves 'OK - how can I improve my attitude,
>operating, station or antennas to give myself a better chance of success?'


Last year I made about 120 qso's in AFS ssb, I asked myself how I could 
improve my station and tried a few things out this year. Some of the 
ideas worked and one or two didn't. I need to re evaluate the ones that 
didn't work because in theory they should have improved the setup. ( in 
particular my 2nd rx antenna )

The same analyses of my CW effort from last year was much simpler, I 
needed to improve my accuracy. No amount of technical improvement to the 
station was going to get me back the 8% miss copied CW.. So that's MY 
goal for operating improvement.

>
>Whether we like it or not, nowadays there is no such thing as a
>'gentlemenly' contest - these two terms are mutually exclusive.

There are boundaries, some I won't cross just to "win" an arbitrary few 
places in a contest listing.

But it will be nice to try and do better again next year :-)


Regards

-- 
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