[UK-CONTEST] 80m CCs : An ideal opportunity to drop PSK ... forgood!

[Lee Volante]

Hi all,

The stance from the Contest Committee has been that PSK operation is 
encouraged because of the bandwidth pressures of using RTTY alone.  First 
mentioned below in June 2008, and has re-occurred a few times since.  Most, 
if not all other arguments come secondary to this.

http://lists.contesting.com/pipermail/uk-contest/2008-June/010581.html

This topic has been discussed at length several times previously with no 
visible outcome.  The introduced 'strategy' element of using the two modes 
and the effect of score normalisation has been questioned before (May 2009). 
Of course the other SSB and CW mode events can be equally bandwidth 
pressured but there's been no call to mix those too.  The extra 20 kHz space 
for RTTY was introduced at the same time as the RTTY / PSK "separate 
contest" rules, and in practice it gets little use at present.

Some entrants prefer using PSK, and some only use PSK, but it seems that the 
majority of entrants prefer RTTY for contesting. This is an echo of what we 
see worldwide - PSK is well established and extremely popular, but there are 
only a tiny fraction of PSK contests compared with RTTY ones. Several posts 
today have given some reasons why. If the 80m CC events are meant to be 
stepping stones to bigger, non-domestic contests, we're backing the wrong 
horse by encouraging PSK so strongly.  PSK contesting is certainly alive and 
well, but the 80m CC rules give the mode disproportionate coverage.

A suggestion might be to retain PSK for those that want to run it, to allow 
newcomers to try more modes (i.e. be all inclusive and tick as many boxes as 
possible) but revert to the original rules whereby PSK operation is not 
mandatory to win and QSOs on both modes do not both count for points.  We'd 
see more use of RTTY in that that extra 20 kHz as a result (which is an 
approximate effective doubling of the earlier available RTTY bandwidth, and 
would be an expression of the entrants of the mode they on average prefer to 
operate), and this spectrum still adheres to the IARU bandplan for data.... 
We've never tried the original rules with the extra bandwidth for RTTY (hint 
hint.)

73,

Lee G0MTN