[UK-CONTEST] SSB / CW best QSO rates

[Gerry Lynch]

On 29/05/2011 17:20, Chris Tran GM3WOJ wrote:
> Hi Steve et al
>
> I don't think it makes any difference to this league table cos the 'qrate'
> hour result is as you describe i.e. the greatest no. of QSOs in a 60-minute
> period. All of the entries are from leading stations doing 24/36/48 hrs in
> major contests I think.

For the people at the top of the world list, I certainly agree. In my 
big rate hour from the Caribbean, I don't think I called CQ once; if I 
did, it certainly wasn't more than a few times. And a CQ was "PJ2T TEST" 
at 40 wpm. 236 is as fast as I can run; simple as that. It was on 20 
metres, early on Saturday evening, in a multi-single operation (M/2s and 
M/Ms won't have quite the same peak rates), the US-Eu path seemed closed 
and it was the first time we had run North America on 20.

In fact, from these sorts of locations, if you turned up in the last few 
hours of the contests and tried to set big rates the sheer volume of the 
pileup would probably overwhelm you. Remember for these rates, you 
ideally want one caller, and only one caller, every time. That rarely 
happens, of course, but you certainly don't want to be dealing with more 
than 3 or 4 callers at a time. QRQ helps here, not just for completing 
the QSO slightly quicker, but more importantly for scaring some of the 
callers away.

On the other hand, I've never had an hour from G that didn't involve 
quite a bit of CQing, even when running 190+ on CW and 260 or so on SSB 
(full hourly rates, not 10 minute or last 100). I think you could set 
higher rates from G by waiting until Sunday late afternoon or evening in 
CQWW or ARRL, catching the sweet spot when the band you're on is already 
dying from the US to Central and Eastern Europe but still hot to here, 
and letting rip. In fact, looking at MI0LLL's superb 321 hour in WW SSB 
last year, I seem to remember (because I worked him for a multiplier on 
15m) that's exactly what Chris did.

73

Gerry ZS1/Gi0RTN