[VHFcontesting] Location, location, location ...

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 09:04:35PM -0500, Donald M. Ross wrote:
> This weekend I had a rather new problem with some of the locals and am
> looking for some advice on how to rectify the issue(s).
> 
> Situation:  There are six active VHF contesters here in Lawton, OK and we
> are all clustered in such a way that there is a maximum of five miles
> between any two of us.  As in all aspects of life, some have better "ears"
> than others and are frequently trying to work stations that the other locals
> can't even hear.  In most cases, the more "hearing impaired" stations will
> call CQ when the stations with the better ears are trying to pick something
> out of the noise.  With few exceptions, I do not believe this to be either
> malicious or bad manners.
> 
> This can not be a unique problem, how are others dealing with this issue?

It is not a unique problem.  Maybe having everyone within five miles of one 
another is more extreme than most situations, but the problem of dealing
with your VHF neighbors is something with which I am familiar.  

For years, I was on the "hearing impaired" side of the equation.  I operated
a lot of VHF contests from N5XU, the University of Texas Amateur Radio Club.
N5XU is not very far from the bottom of the Colorado River valley, at something
like 600' ASL.  Less than 30 miles away, there are several big stations 
running kilowatts, located 900' to 1200' ASL.  N5XU is literally in the 
center of a large city (Austin,) in the center of the computer/engineering
quadrant of the campus (at least 50,000 computers in a 0.5 mile radius,)
and right across the street from a power plant!  Add to that several
very close buildings that are much taller (one we measured is a 30dB 
attenuator on 70cm) and you have a poor location for VHF/UHF.

I know several of these guys in the hills out in the country would get 
annoyed at us calling CQ when they were trying to listen for a weak 
signal.  Most of the time, they'd wait until we'd called CQ several times
and they were good and mad before they'd ever key the mic and tell us in 
a pissed-off way to shut up.  The fact that we were generally 1/3 to 1/2
their age made them even more haughty.

My observation about VHF/UHF is that the _vast_ majority of VHF/UHF weak
signal operators in the contests are not, and do not want to be, contesters.
Some of them are just ragchewers who stumble into something and play along 
for a bit.  The only way you work these people is to call CQ a lot.  The
rest are mostly DXers, whose main objective of the weekend is working 
all-time-new grids.  They don't care about working 50 or 60 QSOs in their
own grid - they want to sit there on 144.200 all weekend and find that 
rover or someone in that next grid out from where they've worked before.
What they really want is a DXing event, not a contest.  This is quite
different from HF contests, where DXers and contesters get along quite
well.

Throw DXers and contesters together on, say, 144.200 (I literally _never_
hear anyone CQing more than a kHz or two off of that frequency in Texas)
and it's easy to have lots of conflict - especially if the DXers can hear
better than you can and they don't understand or want to understand the
motivation and interests of the contesters on frequency.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth E. Harker      "Vox Clamantis in Deserto"      kharker at cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin                   Amateur Radio Callsign: WM5R
Department of the Computer Sciences      VP, Central Texas DX & Contest Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124                         Maintainer of Linux on Laptops
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA            http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------