Hello, First a quick intro. Eventhough this is my first post, I've been lurking here since about the end of 2007, meanwhile studying for my licence, for which I did exam April 16th 2008, and passed.
So today I'm a Novice radio amateur in the Netherlands, which puts me on 70cm/2mtr/10mtr/20mtr/40mtr. Being mostly interested in digital modes, I'm usually active on 20 mtr doing psk31 and some JT65a. Yesterday I logged psk31 QSO #200, and went to take a closer look at my log, and found that all but one of them had RSQ 599 given, and received. So being as guilty as everyone else in my log, I went to take a closer look at how to give accurate RSQ reports, and after some reading, spent most of today, just staring at the waterfall while trying to judge all the signals with an honest RSQ report, and - surprise suprise - only very few signals were actually a true 599 Thinking back to some QSOs I had, to places like Kazakhstan, Canada, and the US, with only a humble magnetic loop mounted in the attic, and a max allowed output of 25 Watts, I can't help but wonder about the importance of RSQ reports, it certainly looks like it's not being taken all that serious. I'm going to at least change that on my end, I've seen too many stations splattering all over my passband who deserved an accurate report so they could have sorted their ALC, power, or whatnot, which brings me to my question. With QSOs as short as they often are on 20 mtr / psk31, what's the point in giving a report at the beginning of the QSO? Shouldn't the report reflect the quality of the whole QSO, rather than just the beginning? Wouldn't it make more sense to give the report at the end, together with the 73? "RSQ 579, 73, good health, good dx, sk" Or am I just looking at a long standing tradition of giving each other the best possible report, so to be friendly? 73, Eric PD9EL
