[CW] Where are all the 80 meter CW ops?

[N2EY at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/20/05 9:45:23 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
n4pgw-list1 at towncorp.net writes:


> > >These days, 80m CW activity is thin on the ground,
> > >even in winter.
> > 
> > Use it or lose it!


Well, I just got back from FD. Used my K2 and a dipole, operating 80/40 CW 
only. Made 170+ QSOs in a few hours of casual operating. About 1/3 on 80 meters 
and 2/3 on 40. 

It was great to hear 80 CW so full of signals, but there was room for more.

> > How can we justify reserving 50% of the band for cw and digital modes if
> > the activity is not there?
> > 
> > Besides the amateur phone operators, I suspect there are non-amateur
> > interests drooling over all those unused frequencies on 80m
> 

> I have no objection to extending the voice band on 80 meters a bit.  80
> meters is a huge amount of real-estate.  The CW portion is larger than
> several ham bands, however, the voice portion is overcrowded.  Of course,
> the CW portion is truly from 3.5 to 4 MHz :).  

Check out what Riley Hollingsworth had to say a few years back, in a speech 
at Dayton:

"Always keep in mind that we are part of a world community. There are third 
world countries that would love to have 75 Meters or a portion of 75 Meters for 
their telephone company for local telephone service. Then they wouldn’t have 
to give tens of millions of dollars to a contractor to have them come in and 
set it up. Each country at these ITU meetings has one vote — just like we do. 
Our people that go to these ITU meetings will tell us that it’s often a 
personal embarassment to them when these countries play back tapes of what they hear 
on 75 and 20 Meters in the American amateur bands. They say, ‘You want to 
expand the bands for amateurs for this type of service?’ "

"It puts them in a very difficult position when they have to defend examples 
of conduct that other countries hear. A lot of these countries don’t like 
America anyway and when they think of the money that auctions for sprectrum would 
bring — sometimes it’s 10, 20 or 40 times their gross national product. Like 
it or not, we’re part of a world community."

The sorts of behavior cited are not because of overcrowding. And they're 
almost all done using voice modes, not CW/digital modes. 

80 meters is probably too
> 
> unstable for most computer digital modes.  
> 


Just the opposite! The colorburst PSK31 watering hole is proof of that.

73 de Jim, N2EY