[UK-CONTEST] Death to the cluster!

[Steve Wilson, G3VMW]

In message <mailman.23.1260475217.12293.uk-contest at contesting.com>, 
"Roger G3SXW" <g3sxw at btinternet.com> writes

>At a rare station (eg VooDudes) cluster can cut the QSO rate in half. This
>is a recent phenomenon: many 'operators' have no clue what they're doing,
>just hitting the button to send their call-sign continuously. Then the
>station to whom I reply does not hear me go back to him through the bedlam
>so I have to send the exchange 3-4 times. This kills the operating fun for
>me. More recently (especially on 40 mtrs) I've had no option but to QSY.
>Then I get a few minutes of sensible QSO rate, then the bedlam starts all
>over again. I sometimes find that I QSY every ten minutes. Plain daft! I
>realise it's horses for courses: for a non-rare station it might help. But
>Cluster users need to put brain in gear before starting their motor. Cluster
>does help us to find mults too, but on balance I nowadays wish it had never
>been invented. Without it I guess that some 20+% more people could get into
>our logs: more QSOs, better scores, our score would also benefit, we have
>more fun and so are more likely to DXpedition again the following year.
>73 de Roger/G3SXW.

Roger makes a good point in respect of extremely rare stations in CQWW 
and I have experienced the 40m phenomenon that he describes from West 
Africa. You have no option but to pick stations off the edges of the 
pile-up or work split frequency. It isn't much fun, but that's the price 
of having a rare callsign.

During CQWW CW this year VP2V/DL7VOG actually asked me to spot him on 
15m, which of course I did and his run rate increased rapidly soon 
afterwards.

For less exotic stations, a cluster spot is a significant boost to Run 
rate in my experience. I noticed this when I was spotted several times 
when running on 80m in the last period of CQWW and it helped maintain a 
high rate for three hours or so. The key factor is how many stations 
call at any one time and it is a fine line between too few and too many, 
but give me too many any time!

PacketCluster, Skimmer, SO2R, even the use of SCP or logging innovations 
like ESM are all fairly recent contesting innovations and we simply must 
adapt. Despite our reservations, none of these things will be going away 
any time soon. Far from deterring people from contesting, I believe the 
numbers of participants is actually increasing?

-- 
Steve Wilson, G3VMW
Bramham, Wetherby, West Yorkshire