This morning, I found a couple of rants about contesting on /r/amateurradio:
Just a rant here which I am extrapolating from another comment I made.
This weekend was a write off for me. I’m not a contest operator. I don’t have any interest in contesting. In fact I am mostly casual CW and that’s it.
But we had people spewing SSB contest crap right down to 7020 which basically made everyone interested in a bit of casual CW hang up the keys for the weekend. This is I assume because 7050-7200 was wedged with contest operators.
Region 1 / 2 band plans say stay above 7050. Stay above it! Don’t be a dick!
Grr! Going to try 30m.
and
Despite the last few months of talk, the HF bands aren’t dead. This weekend, I made tens of contacts to every continent but Antarctica.
But, as soon as the contest ended, All I hear is static. I hear no CQs, no responses. For the past few nights I heard hundreds of people all night on 20m, 40m, and 80m, now I hear none. Every continent worked, with a $30 end fed wire up 25′. To the point, where I logged only countries outside of the US, and I had about 120, only one being Canada. And now nothing.
Pick up the damn mic and talk. There are thousands of you out there. And I would like to talk to the other hemisphere more than “[CALLSIGN] 5904.”
The only reason the bands are dead, is because no one gets on them. Sometimes we are our own worse enemies. And that is horrible.
Despite the somewhat indecent language, I think both posts have a point. Yes, contesters aren’t allowed on the WARC bands, but generally 30m and above are not very usable at night this time of the year.
As for the bands being dead, I ran into that last night myself. I got on 80m around 0100Z and didn’t see a single signal on my bandscope. I thought it was propagation, but after calling CQ a few times, W4AUV came back to me and had an S7 signal. There was just no one on. I guess they were either watching football or were all tuckered out from the contest.
What do you think?
Dave New, N8SBE says
There’s always a definite lull after a contest. Of the folks that participated, they are all ‘radioed out’ for a while, at least. I always find it fascinating to watch the waterfall on a popular contest band at the instant the contest ends. It looks like someone took a squeegee and wiped the band clean, it’s that startling.
Give it a few days. You can’t force people to get on the air. They will find their way back, one way or another.
As for intruders in the bottom end of the bands, some other regions that are not run by the FCC depend on volunteer band plans, while the FCC actually regulates phone from CW, so transmitting phone in the CW portion of the band can earn you an NAL from the FCC. Too bad that isn’t enforced by regulation worldwide.
Steve - W8SFC says
I hope I am wrong, but I think part of the blame for this is the people who have been using contesting as a selling point for their technologically advanced hardware. Part of that is from chasing the dollar – who else is going to buy their products but those who are contest fanatics? Of course I would if I had the money, but since I have been a ham 90% of the focus for these companies has been contesters, and very little attention has been given to those of us who are in amateur radio for the activity and fun of making contacts alone.
I believe these companies have created their own monster by marketing so heavily in one direction. Maybe it is just me, but it seems they have all been driving this contesting thing and doing it simply because it makes them more profit. That kind of thinking is short sighted because once you saturate the market with uber expensive hardware, the demand for that product drops, which eventually cuts into their profit margin. Then when the market for the super bazillion transceiver starts to sag, these companies double down and come out with the super bazillion extra LED model that costs half again more than what it replaced. This is a scheme doomed to failure – unless they come up with a new marketing strategy, and unfortunately they have yet to focus on the other 90 percent of amateur radio.
Regarding regulation of the bands divisions, there should be a penalty for taking a mode out of bounds. I don’t believe that will be coming from the contest organizers, but it should. If you turn in contacts outside of designated frequencies for a mode, whether Phone or CW or any other designated frequencies not meant for use by that mode, that should be an automatic disqualification because it is cheating. Not only are they cheating their fellow contesters, but they are cheating everyone using that frequency for legitimate use on the frequency they are misusing.
I think the contest organizations should police their activities as much as possible, by sanctioning violators. Repeat offenders should be reported to FCC for multiple violations, which I believe would be a disincentive to those contemplating nudging over into a prohibited frequency to rack up points. There will still be cheaters but their ranks will thin if they realize their work will be zeroed out if they get caught. If the contest organizers would do their part I think we’d see a lot less of this band invasion.
Of course this is coming from a guy who has been a ham for little over a year.
Derick AB9PR says
Dan, for me, amateur radio is first and foremost about civil communication. Copying and pasting into your blog angry and profane rants, much less from people who don’t even give their real names and call signs, is not helpful.
There can, and should, be a healthy discussion of the pros and cons of contesting, but this isn’t the way start the conversation. From having read your blog for quite a while now, I know you could have done better.
Rick Barnich KA8BMA says
I think contest organizers could and should place restrictions on frequency ranges they will accept entries from. If your contact isn’t going to count, maybe you won’t make it
Kevan Nason, N4XL says
I believe the lack of band activity has little to do with contesting and almost everything to do with society changes. The internet with its social networking sites and blogs, like this one, let people scratch the “itch” of needing to communicate ideas and feel they are part of the bigger world picture. It used to be Ham Radio provided one of the few pathways to do that. Not anymore.
I do not operate FT8 (yet), but I hear about it on almost every ham website I visit, magazine I read, and regional Ham club meeting I attend. The enthusiasm for it is phenomenal. Both presentations I’ve sat through on it have said it isn’t a long QSO friendly mode though. If not, then why is it so popular with the non-contesting crowd?
Seems to me the answer is because it allows many people without great stations to work DX and chase awards. It lets people who don’t want to buy all that fancy contest gear have a great time playing radio — even though they don’t have 20 minute QSO’s. MANY of the same people who are not interested in contesting love FT8. They don’t care that they can’t have a long QSO. That’s a radical change from when I was first licensed as WN8VDI in 1975. We all wanted long QSO’s. Of course, we used to have news stories that dealt with a topic for five or more minutes instead of 30 seconds like we do now. Society has changed to the point where many people don’t have long attention spans or strong social skills so that they are comfortable talking to strangers about more than “Your 59 in South Carolina. The weather is 46F. Thanks for the contact.” They are more comfortable with hi/bye QSO’s than to talk about their personal life or delve into their deep ham radio knowledge. Too many people are reluctant to say “I don’t know how that works. Tell me about it.”
I did not contest the first 25 years of my ham career. I was a rag chewer. Now I’m a competitive contester and try to spend 35+ hours in the chair during the big events. I’ve learned more about ham radio by trying to improve my station and skills so I can be competitive than I ever did in my non-contesting days. Saying “5905” 1,300 times in a weekend isn’t the fun part. What I enjoy about it are things like seeing propagation theory come alive in real time, actually observing how selecting a different antenna can change your take off angle and signal strength, explore the effects of adjusting a rig to reduce QRM and minimize intermod, learning how to bust big DX pileups when you only run a 100 watt station with an antenna at 50 ft, seeing your ability to accurately exchange information with an S-3 signal under far less than ideal conditions improve, etc. (That last by the way has helped me in local ARES events.) Contesting is not for everyone. However, those who only focus on the chaos contesting brings miss those types of positive experiences.
By the way… I preach to my fellow contesters they should be respectful of non-contesters. I work hard to live up to that belief and avoid causing QRM while contesting. Having said that, I know for a fact I have inadvertently interfered with non-contesters. I also know for a fact people have both inadvertently AND intentionally interfered with me. When people with different objectives share the same spectrum, a spectrum where propagation is constantly changing, there will inevitably be conflicts. Methods to resolve those conflicts seems beyond the scope of the blog hosts question though.
Passionate_SWL says
Like a few others among us radio hobyyists who still have to earn the money for the hobby, I’m an SWL who doesn’t have much time for seriously playing radio during the week. The situation with contest-free weekends countable with the fingers of one hand sure has contributed to the fact that I’m “(S)till (W)ithout (L)icense” after 30 years in the radio hobby:
I have to admit that I don’t really understand contests – actual radio sports like fox hunts have a practical, radio-specific skill (“fast RDF”) or purpose for a background, something that could be helpful in a specific situation. What’s the point of “making points”? What’s the point of all the cheating and all-elbows attitude that makes many people confuse this kind of “I have more power than you” competition with “sports”, then forgetting to be a “good sport” completely, so much that they don’t even respect the upper and lower band limits anymore, not to mention band segments or special purpose channels like the IBP frequencies?
That being said, my qualm with contests is that anyone who doesn’t want to participate in these contests is practically excluded from the hobby. Many of these contests leave me no way to stay out of it except 30m and 17m and mind you, I can use 30m only because I understand code and 17m is lacking the needed MUF in my latitudes most of the day. If *you* don’t find a frequency to play radio the regular way. *I* have nothing to pick up with my receivers. Or too much of it – it depends.
To be fair, there are a lot of small contests that are completely fine, they are for a very limited time and conducted in perfect discipline. What makes that all bad is that there’s simply too many of them and they often go on top of each other and/or one time-limted EU contest is making way for the next one, not to mention worldwide contests, so on most weekends it’s really CQ TEST from Friday evening to Monday 0:00 UTC. As a European, I could actually enjoy ARRL contests if there wouldn’t be so much of my own continent on top of it, with many southern an eastern EU clubs apparently not having any rules at all. This has gone so far that people gave up trying to have normal QSOs during that time, because it’s so frustratingly impossible to find (and keep!) a frequency for a while.
My joy is packing my stuff to go to extremely quiet places and putting up my toys there for high-performance reception and I have time for that only on weekends. I enjoy picking up true DX and extremely weak stations. and while I consider this the very core of amateur radio I certainly don’t want to tell other people how they should play radio. But fact is, on the vast majority of weekends it’s simply not worth the effort because big guns yelling their callsign and a number on top of each other is not everyone’s idea of ham radio and it sure isn’t mine, Yet contests are absolutely dominating almost every weekend and I get to enjoy my considerable investments into the hobby only when I have a day off or on vacation. How can this be considered fair?
When “increasing activity” (for what reason exactly?) is the purpose of this, how can we let that descend into a true cut-throat competition that is putting off anyone who isn’t into that game, thus decreasing activity? Like I said, this has kept me from getting even licensed for decades and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one and I know a couple licensed hams who gave up the hobby for the very same reason – because they can’t enjoy it when they have time for it, due to a lobby of clubs and organizations that consider contests the most important thing in ham radio and/or just don’t understand that their local activity is affecting the rest of the world on shortwave. This is certainly destructive and it has gone too far for too long.