[PVRCNC] W4MY in NORTH CAROLINA SECTION NEWS - January 2013

[Amateur Radio Station W4MPS]

/Excerpt from //ARRL's NC Section news:/
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NC QSO PARTY FEBRUARY 24th – This month we have a guest columnist: Marty 
Young, W4MY, Chairman of the NC QSO Party.
Marty provided the following to the NC Section News:

North Carolina QSO Party February 24, 2013 (10 am - 8 pm)
www.ncqsoparty.org
by Marty Young, W4MY, Chairman

The Raleigh Amateur Radio Society has assumed leadership of the North 
Carolina QSO Party as of its 2013 running. Check out the website, the 
new rules are posted. We made some changes for 2013. We moved the time 
up two hours to go from 10am to 8pm. We kept the duration of 10 hours, 
but felt this gives us more daylight to work the upper bands. Also, by 
ending earlier folks have more time to get ready for work Monday. 
Activity always slowed down past 8pm in our experience, possibly for 
that reason. Added 6 and 2 meters. Now the small signal VHF guys can 
participate using their native mode if they wish. So, welcome small 
signal VHFers! No specific categories exist for VHF yet, you'll compete 
with everyone else. If participation is strong on these new bands a new 
category may be considered in the future. W4DW will be operating 6, but 
its up to you small signal VHFers to get the propagation gods to cooperate.

We have “normalized” the point structure for all participants. 2 points 
for all phone QSOs and 3 points for each CW QSO. It doesn't matter who 
your QSO is with. This greatly simplifies our job to score your log. 
Everyone sounds the same on the air, so you don't need to keep track of 
it either!

Added a QRP Expedition Class. With the success of expeditions we're 
giving the QRPers a chance to compete for an award. And speaking of 
expeditions, we cleaned up most of the early problems with managing this 
class by making the points the same as everyone else. We didn't want the 
expeditions to become a “super mobile” and attempted at first to write 
restrictive rules to prevent someone from creating efficient ways at 
blowing through counties like a mobile. We'd like expeditions to 
consider going to rarer counties and putting up an antenna that works 
pretty well and stay a while to really activate that county. But in the 
end, we decided to keep the restrictions out and allow each one to 
decide what strategy is best for their situation and fun factor. A 
competitor will have to determine the trade off of getting their QSOs by 
working fewer per county with a small antenna but moving to new counties 
to work 'em again, vs. putting up a more substantial temporary antenna 
and moving less, staying a while in the county to really activate it. 
For mobiles, and expeditions also, the rules were left to enable county 
sitting. So, be careful with safety being the top priority, if you want 
to do it, remember that you can only have one QTH per QSO. So, you will 
have to manage your pile up in a way to have multiple QSOs with callers 
if you are doing this. We provided the link in the rules to the MARC 
county hunter site to help you with determining the county line and how 
to sit on it. We added DC as a multiplier and clarified the 14 Canadian 
provinces. We will be awarding new plaques for the winners. They are 
really neat transparent monoliths that refract a cool Carolina Blue hue. 
Marc, W4MPS, did a great job securing them. Marc has also revamped the 
certificates with a new battleship NC header. We really want to get logs 
electronically. But, we realize that there are still folks logging 
manually and we don't want to dissuade them from participating and 
sending in their log. So, continue to send in your log however you have 
it! We're going to have some really cool tools on the new website to 
enter your log, and I suppose the day is coming sometime that all logs 
will have to be submitted electronically. We on the committee want to be 
ready for it.

We are keeping the established map to track activations that are 
announced. This surprised me how popular this was, so we are giving it 
high priority. If you don't see it quite yet, Andy, AA9P, our IT guy 
will have it up shortly. The things that have made NCQP unique and great 
are staying. NI4BK aboard the battleship USS North Carolina will be one 
of the bonus stations, and they tell me they will again be using the 
original WW2 era radio equipment during the event. The other bonus 
station, W4DW, will be activated at the super station of N1LN and 
staffed by seasoned operators to give out as many QSOs as humanly 
possible. And if you've seen the N1LN station, you know they can do it! 
We kept the CHE/DAR bonus as is, a very cool way to get another bonus 
and an incentive to expeditions and mobiles top go to these rare ones.

Lastly, I'd like to put a word in for one style of operating that is 
quite effective in QSO parties. That is calling CQ. In regular contests, 
searching and pouncing can be just as fruitful as calling CQ, especially 
in the early going. But QSO parties are different. In ours, everyone out 
there is looking for you! They won't know you’re there if you’re not 
calling! Ninety six percent of those outside NC are searching and 
pouncing, so it’s best if you are calling CQ. Think about it. Why should 
someone out there call CQ when only 1 out of 50 states count for credit? 
(Some do it, yes, but not many) Believe me, if you're calling CQ you'll 
get answers back from more than you thought!

So that's it. Mark your calendar, and get on the air! It's lots of fun!

73 de Marty, W4MY