[VHFcontesting] re: W3ZZ's QST Contesting Article

[Joel N. Weber II]

   1. The perception that VHF contesting has become
   "defacto" microwave contests. I really don't believe
   this is so, at least here in the upper Midwest, do
   having the microwave bands make a big difference in
   scoring, you bet. But then that is an incentive to get
   the equipment to get on those bands; it's surely
   prodding me to do so. To de-emphasis the microwave
   bands or to fragment the entry classes (VHF/low-UHF
   vs. microwave) would be a mistake. It will take away
   the incentive and challenge for building a bigger,
   better station. And isn't contesting itself intended
   to be a challenge? And as such so should station
   building.

It might be good if rather than having a limited multiop award, there
was an award for the highest total score, and another award calculated
by taking the score for only the best four bands that each station
operated, and finding the top score there.  (And the algorithm there
probably needs to iterate over all possible combinations of four
bands, since there may be cases where it isn't immediately obvious
whether the band with the large grid contribution or the band with the
large number of QSO points is more important.)

   2. Cabrillo log file submissions are onerous; this
   really surprises me, especially coming from folks who
   are posting here on the reflector, and are therefore
   computer equipped.

That would be like claiming to be surprised that stations that have
HF/VHF/UHF rigs and large HF antenna farms (but no substantial VHF+
antenna farms) and consistently win HF contests don't consistently win
VHF+ contests when they enter those.

While I do run my own mail server, I don't own a working laptop.  If I
succeed in putting together a rover station for the June contest, it
is not clear to me that it will be trivial to have a working computer
that can run off battery power.

And every iteration of logging software setup I've seen ends up taking
more time than people wanted and not working as well as one might
like.  (There was one HF contest where I worked W1AF where getting
this debugged delayed getting on the air, and ``debugged'' eventually
meant ``tell the logging software that there's no interface to the
radio, so that it will allow band changes to be manually entered, so
that we can get on with the contest''.  W1MX field day logging tends
to end up involving copying data from paper logs into the computer in
the middle of the contest.  The computer logging mostly works at W1XM
but is a bit flakier than one might like.)

If you have time to get the logging stuff set up and debugged, it can
probably work well.  But there are plenty of stations that scramble to
get things together at the last minute, and giving them a disincentive
to bother would certainly not help the percieved problems that this
thread seems to be trying to fix.

   4. Contest are too long. I disagree, if anything they
   may be too short, the longer the contest period the
   better chance of having opening of some kind. How many
   times have you seen 6M close minutes before the
   contest begins to only reopen just after it ends??

I think this might be a good place for a parallel scoring event.  Two
days of day long rover operating a couple times a year strikes me as
about as much as I'd really ever be likely to want to do.  And I get
the impression that the large multiop stations in general don't have
an excess of people that would make a substantially longer contest
pratical.  If you provide more opportunities, you'll spread out the
serious stations over various contests, resulting in less activity in
the biggest contests, ...

I don't know exactly what your situation is, but I don't have the
option of operating from anywhere that's convenient for getting
non-contesting things done in the dull moments, and I have lots of
things that aren't ham radio that I want to do with my life, too.  I
suspect a significant fraction of the contest participants (perhaps
even ``most'') are similar to me in these regards.

Leaving your radio tuned to 50.125 during non-contest periods and
calling CQ occasionally is probably a fine thing to do.  And if you
need awards to be willing to do this, there's VUCC.  Would a week long
contest really make a difference?