[UK-CONTEST] 80m CC's and the data leg

[Dave Lawley]

Well it's nice to have stirred up some debate, though shouldn't everyone 
be preparing for the major CW contest of the year, now less than a week 
away? That's where I've been for the last day and a half, helping put up 
antennas at the new G0KPW site in Suffolk.

I must point out that these are my views and have not been discussed 
within HFCC.

Think of it like this: some people consider snooker and darts to be 
sports - the media report on them as though they were, but they sure as 
hell don't figure in the Olympics and they really don't fit a 
common-sense view of what constitutes sporting endeavour. Well to me, 
RTTY is analagous to snooker and darts. Datamodes sure as hell don't 
figure in WRTC.

It's not just the original posting which wanted to change the format of 
the contest exchange to fit the software; we've also had comments in the 
past about how great the RTTY contest was because someone could read a 
magazine or watch a DVD at the same time. Would anyone even think of 
doing that during a phone or CW contest? And the suggestion that there 
are people using MixW or similar to decode CW exchanges won't fly. 
No-one who was remotely serious about CW contesting would do that, yet 
on RTTY you have to do that (unless you're G3SJJ). And just because it 
is becoming more popular doesn't automatically mean it's any good. I 
believe Big Brother is popular on TV.

In case you think it's just this grumpy OM who finds he doesn't like 
RTTY, an 18-year old in our club did the 80m CC datamode events for a 
while but found he didn't like them either. And a year or two ago, when 
G3GVV was running the radio club at Tonbridge School, he asked me to go 
and give a demonstration of RTTY and PSK31 to several of the club 
members, schoolboys in their teens. He felt that they might be more 
attracted to datamodes because of the technology; but their reaction was 
that it was impersonal and didn't have the magic of talking to someone 
using the mic. Frankly, however much you automate datamodes they are 
going to looke pretty feeble compared with an Internet chat room. We 
should be emphasising the fun of radio communication, rather than 
focussing on getting one computer to talk to another computer over radio.

I've tried RTTY contesting and I've found I really don't like it. I'm 
not saying abolish it - ham radio is a broad church, that's one of its 
great strengths but RTTY contesting really feels to me (and from the 
mails, plenty of others as well) like darts, compared with the sports of 
phone or CW contesting. Perhaps the 80m datamode events could be run in 
the same slots as now, but count towards a separate RTTY CC, rather than 
being lumped in with phone and CW?

Dave G4BUO