[Elecraft] Elecraft CW Net cancellation

[David Gilbert]

Look at it this way.  There are several contests without a signal report 
at all in the exchange.  Do they bother you?  I suspect not, or at least 
they wouldn't if you were a contester because you'd be following the 
rules of that contest and all you'd care about is optimizing your score 
like you would in any other competitive endeavor.

If a contest exchange happened to require that everyone send the 
abbreviation of the contest ("CQWPX" for example), would that bother 
you?  It might not have any practical value and it would be arbitrarily 
annoying to most participants, but if the contest sponsors had their 
reason for requiring it what's the problem?  I don't see any difference 
in the case of "599" ... we all agree it's meaningless but as I've 
already described there are fairly easily understood reasons why it is 
still a requirement.  I don't see why that should put you off except for 
the fact that you can't disassociate it from it's use in an entirely 
different context.

If we had a dictionary of ham radio terms "599" would have two entries 
something like this:

a.  adj ... a rating used to describe signal readability, strength, and 
signal quality in conversational contacts

b.  noun ... a placeholder in the required exchange for many contests

73,
Dave   AB7E



On 2/20/2012 1:14 AM, David Pratt wrote:
> In a recent message, David Gilbert <xdavid at cis-broadband.com> writes
>> I'd offer the opinion that crisp operating
>> practices learned in contesting beat casual roundtable chats with
>> friends hands down.
>
> "Crisp" they may be, but at least with roundtable chats you do get 
> genuine reports.  This 5NN stuff really does put me off contests :-(
>
> 73