[UK-CONTEST] Re QTC in WAEDC RTTY

[Dave Lawley]

Ian Maude wrote:
> johndunnington wrote:
>> Ian maybe this will help a little..seems to be very little written on the
>> subject.. not read it and it is 2004  73 John G3LZQ
>>   
> Thanks John, I understand the exchange (I think) but I am no closer to 
> understanding the concept.  Why would one do such a thing?  If you were 
> running on 20m for example, you could put down  LOT more points than 
> waiting for QTC's to be read to you surely?  I just cannot get my head 
> around it.  Who thought of the idea and why! :)
> 
> 73 Ian
> 
It's all about message passing Ian. Many of us are, frankly, dismayed by 
the redundancy of the exchange in many large contests. It means that 
most of the time all you have to copy is the callsign. CQWW is a lot of 
fun but you KNOW that every G is going to send 5914, every JA will send 
5925, etc. Similarly in the ARRL contest we all send 59400 (nuff said). 
These are BIG contests and they aren't going to change.

Years ago the CQ 160 contest used to have serial number as the exchange, 
but they changed that to 'country name' which is meaningless. They have 
modified this for 2009 but although there was a proposal to go to 
locator square they have bottled out and the exchange will be CQ zone. Sigh.

In RSGB contests, and WAE, and many others, you have to copy the 
exchange as well as the callsign! WAE goes one further and you can boost 
your score massively by copying QTCs. Typically you are running pretty 
fast on the first day so may not choose to take QTCs, but on the Sunday 
as the rate inevitably slows, you can take a block of 10 QTCs in under 3 
minutes and as each of the ten carries the same value as a QSO, this 
boosts your score and - more importantly perhaps - it is a test of your 
skill in copying information at high speed, which is what contesting 
should be all about.

Unfortunately DARC decided to allow packet cluster in all categories 
which utterly ruined WAE for me, so now I don't take part at all. But 
that's a separate debate which has been gone over many times before.

73, Dave G4BUO