[Elecraft] Contesters and Band Conjestion

[Jim Brown]

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