[VHFcontesting] Assistance and Roving

[James Duffey]

This is long, but I didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Please forgive the bandwidth. 
I am glad to see this conversation about assistance in the June contest taking place. Here are my thoughts, mostly from a rover perspective. I have been thinking about this since the change in rules allowing assistance was first announced and it is a multifaceted topic, with lots of ins and outs. 
W7QQ and I used an internet connection through my smart  phone for passive assistance in last July’s CQ WW VHF contest when we operated as W7QQ/r. We roved in AZ and NM. Cell coverage was an issue in many areas, but we found having access to the internet to be useful. Looking at the cluster was not useful, at least in this part of the country. When 6M was open, there were too many spots to be of use, and attempts to limit the spots geographically reduced the utility of the spots greatly. That was exacerbated by there not being much activity here. There were few if any spots from the areas we were roving in, and opening up the geographical area wider so we finally got some spots resulted in mostly spots of stations to which we did not have propagation. When the band was open the cluster was overwhelmed with spots and the spots went by so quickly they couldn’t be read. So I quickly gave up on that as it was either like trying to drink from a fire hose, or dying of dehydration, with neither situation accurately reflecting the condition of the band, at least in this part of the country. What eventually did work for us was looking at the DX Sherlock MUF maps to get an idea where to point the beam for existing openings, particularly to areas in which we needed multipliers, and also to identify the beginning of openings to new areas. In this fashion, we were able to open the band several times to areas where the MUF was increasing and to be the first or among the first QSO people worked in our area from that area. Knowing where the band is open to or going to open to is almost as useful as knowing who is on, and that is pretty straight forward to do with assistance. In some cases it may be better. As far as I could tell, there were no 2M spots of us or anyone else from the area in which we roved during the contest, but to be fair, the bulk of stations we worked were casual contesters. Self-spotting is not allowed in the CQ contest, so we did not do that.  But I will in June, as soon as I figure out the best way to do it. 
With the advent of all sorts of assistance in ARRL VHF Contests, I, like many others, am revisiting what the best strategy is to take advantage of the new rules. A rover is already pretty busy juggling all of the normal rover activities, so any additional activities or integration of additional equipment associated with assistance should be efficient. Internet access will be through cell phone, so universal coverage during a rove will be an issue. 
APRS may take care of some of the problems with universal coverage, at least for the self spotting part of assistance, but there are coverage issues there as well, in addition to another radio to integrate into the rover, and the issues that brings. I would like to hear the experience of rovers who have used APRS in the past.
a.	Did it help, that is, did fixed stations access and use the APRS information? 
b.	Was coverage adequate? 
c.	Was integrating another radio problematic, particularly from the standpoint of having two signals on the band at the same time and the possible front end overload/burnout issues that could arise?
d.	Does the grid get posted automatically?
e.	Is there a mechanism to get the APRS report to a cluster?
f.	Do you think it increased your score? If so, by how much?
I suppose that the APRS radio problems could be circumvented by using a smartphone app to upload information to the APRS internet sites. But that has potential coverage problems too.  
The APRS over smart phone, and the internet access to the MUF may be the simplest thing for a rover to try. 
Opening a cluster window in the logging program will be useful, as will any band map that the program can generate.  But that is predicated on getting spots that are indicative of what one can work, which I think will be sparse in this part of the country. Still, one takes what one can get. I suppose that a solution to this is to set up your own temporary skimmer for the contest feeding the RBN, perhaps at your home station while you are gone to feed spots to the cluster.  This should work well when you are close to home, but perhaps one can convince others in the area to put 6M skimmers on the air for the contest as well.  
I like the idea of calling CQ on CW every 10 minutes or so when operating SSB to be spotted on the RBN. I will do that and hope others do so as well. But one needs to stay around long enough to make the spots useful to those who see them; maybe 10 minutes or so? That might reduce productivity if the band is dead. Everything is a trade. CQing with CW on a dead band should be the default for serious contesters now, if it wasn’t before. The RBN will pick you up before human spots can and 15dB or so earlier.
The success of assistance in the contests will depend greatly on stations spotting other stations and sharing those spots universally. It is particularly important that the fixed stations spot the rovers. This spotting  is something we as VHF operators are not experienced with. 
Assistance brings with it more things to do. There is already a lot to do in a rover. I hope that some of this gets automated someday. It would be nice to have logging programs with the capability, at least for VHF contests, to automatically self-spot.  It would be nice if you are connected to a cluster; have the logger send a message to the cluster automatically and spot you when you have changed grids, or frequencies, or both. But I suspect that may be a long time coming. 
There is also the relatively low tech solution of just calling someone with the cell phone and telling him where you are and asking for a spot.  Or, they can call you. I think that is legal under the new rules. It may be one way to get around the coverage issue, if you have coverage in one spot in a new grid, you can call someone from there, but you may not be able to from the spot at which you stop. It does require another device to pay attention to.  
I think that the chat room will not be of much use to a rover unless one is doing EME or MS. I have never been able to get up early enough in the morning to do that. There is a lot of overhead involved in chatting and unless you have a second op, I suspect that it is possible to spend a lot of time in the chat room without getting a QSO out of it, at least around here. 
One problem is that Roverlog, a favorite of many rovers, does not support cluster operation, so if one wants to still use this old and reliable friend, one will need to use a separate cluster program, and I think that the interface with Roverlog will not be as convenient as N1MM+, for example, particularly when it comes to generating band maps. 
Here is my current plan for dealing with assistance as a rover in the June ARRL contest. Comments or constructive suggestions are welcome:
1.	Post my route and proposed schedule before the rove as I have always done. Distribute as widely as I can. This has been effective in the past and should still be effective as people will know where to look for me when. No high tech involvement required and no reliance on cell phone coverage or APRS coverage is required. Also, if other fixed stations use a chat room, or exchanging e-mail, or even phone calls, it may generate a few more QSOes if those who have my itinerary can give it to those who don’t. 
2.	Along with 1), send out a plea for people to spot me when they hear or work me. 
3.	Along with 1), send out a plea for people to occasionally call CQ or test on CW when they are operating phone so that they get spotted on the RBN.
4.	Scan the bands actively looking for activity, including tuning high up in the band and tuning the CW portion. 
5.	Use a cell phone (smart phone) for internet connection while roving and use it as a “hotspot” for the logging computer. That way there is only one interface to deal with. There is no way I am getting more than one display in the back seat of my Soob or even a larger one than my laptop and the iPhone display is small and requires some work for the brain to process. It is not spot a spot at a glance friendly.
6.	Monitor the Es MUF map to identify openings before they occur or as they are developing. That map will probably be kept up all the time. 
7.	Use the cluster/bandmap feature of N1MM+ with VHF filters and reasonable geographic filters to identify potential new stations to work.
8.	Spot other stations I work when I am in the S&P mode. 
9.	Use APRS through the smart phone to post location if feasible and if the utility of adding  APRS is good enough.
10.	Look into putting up a VHF skimmer in the home station while I rove to feed the RBN so I, and others in the area will have a relatively local source of spots.
I think that the idea of a gateway to aggregate spots from the various sources and pass them on to a DX cluster will be of great utility, but it seems like a difficult and long project. I am not a software person.
Just because we now have assistance doesn’t mean we should give up traditional and proven ways of generating QSOes and finding stations. We shouldn’t. Assistance should be in addition to traditional methods. 
I am probably not going to be the first to point this out, and certainly won’t be the last, but I am going to state the obvious here and the obvious conclusion; the density of spots will likely be the same or nearly the same as the density of VHF operators, so those areas of the country that have more VHF activity will have more spots, and hence more assistance, than in an area where VHF activity is low. Therefore, a solution or solutions for an area in which there are lots of VHF operators and hence lots of spots, or a potential for lots of spots, will not necessarily benefit those who live in areas where VHF activity is less or be the optimal solution for those areas where activity is less. Using the cluster mode/band map feature of my logging program won’t benefit me much if there are no spots that are relevant to my operating area to identify or map. So, I think that those who expect assistance to make up for a lack of activity in VHF contests will be disappointed. It might help generate and keep interest in the contest for those who get on, and draw attention to them, but it probably isn’t going to increase the number of people who get on. 
Will there be some discussion on this at Dayton, either at the VHF forum formally, or at the Friday night get together informally? It seems like a good and useful topic to pursue. 
I still worry about abuse of the new rules. I hope that there isn’t any. 

James Duffey KK6MC
Cedar Crest NM