[VHFcontesting] How to Make FM Contesting Succeed

[beamar]

A couple of comments. First, a significant percentage of these FMers, have radios that will work SSB on VHF. Let's try and get them to push the USB button on the radio, during the contest. Some small percentage of them might like what they hear. 
As to the ARES aspects of FM simplex. I am an AEC, in Polk County, FL, which is over 2000 square miles, of land area. We hammer on  simplex coverage, all the time. We try and explain to everyone that the repeater might not be there, when we need it. During the last SET, we simulated a repeater outage. Things worked better than we thought, but, there is still a lot of room for improvement in base station antennas. We have also tried to point out the advantages of SSB to handle traffic, in a large county, like Polk. Maybe some of these guys that won't put up an antenna for ARES, will put one up for a contest?
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Buddy WB4OMG