On Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:29:31 -0600, Tom wrote: >Yep, contests are much more important than gentlemen's agreements >and courtesy these days. (IMHO)
The reality of worldwide frequency allocations is that on some bands, contesters MUST violate bandplans to work stations outside their own country. On 40M, for example, JA stations have a rather limited bandwidth to operate RTTY and it's pretty low on the band. On 80M, RTTY cannot operate above 3600 kHz due to a rather dumb error made by a low level FCC clerk who rewrote the ham Rules several years ago. One of our club members, operating from Aruba (in the Caribbean) made 409 contacts on 80M, 809 on 40M, 1,127 on 20M, and 869 on 15M. This is in 24 hours of a 30 hour contest period. That means there were at least that many active stations that had to cram into the spectrum that the FCC gives us. There are similar conflicts with SSB operation worldwide, especially on 40M. Our club alone had 77 members on the air in the contest. There are MANY times when I can tune across 80M during hours of darkness and hear NO signals at all. There are MANY times I can tune across 40M and hear fewer than a dozen CW signals and half that many PSK signals. On a non-contest weekend, perhaps twice that number. Assuming two people per QSO, that means casual QSOs are sharing a band with a FAR larger number of contesters. In other words, casual operators are simply a few percent of the total number of hams using the band. Heck -- a good contester can easily run 50 QSOs per hour using a few hundred Hz bandwidth (if he's got a K3) and the top contesters run at twice that rate. The good contesters I know all listen before transmitting, and ask if the frequency is busy if they hear nothing. But band conditions change, sometimes rather quickly. A station can be running on a frequency for an hour, and conditions change so that you and he are now hearing each other. No one is being discourteous, it's just band conditions. Last week during Stew Perry, I'd been running a frequency for a half hour, and was making Qs as far as the east coast (I'm near SF). A W2 shows up, doesn't hear me (he probably had a big noise level, or maybe was on a Beverage pointed to EU), so no matter how many times I told him QRL, he ignored me. Discourteous? Probably just his local noise. Note also that contests never use the WARC bands. 30M is a great band for CW ragchewing, and I've never heard it crowded (except when a couple of really rare DXpeditions are there at the same time)! 73, Jim Brown K9YC VP -- Northern California Contest Club _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
