A Sort of Followup

Just under a year ago, I posted an entry in my Ham Radio Series;  #22 on using a major contest for your fun and edification.   

Since I spent today playing in and around a similar radio contest, I wanted to post a followup to that.  Let me do a brief recap first. 

Let's start with the big one: why on earth should anyone care?  Assuming you have no desire to enter the contest and try to run up a score, I see two reasons.  First and foremost is to have fun.  DX contests bring stations from all over the world onto the air to compete to be the best in the different classes or (less formally) best in their country.  They also bring a ton of guys with smaller stations who are there to work more countries for their own interest or entertainment.  For people who don't strive to work other countries, there's a persistent image of straining to hear weak stations and the farther away they are the weaker.  While it does happen, I can't begin to tell you how many times I've heard people surprised at how loud and easy many of their DX contacts are. 

A more pragmatic reason is that it's good training for operating in bad, crowded conditions.  Much like disaster communications, there's a few standardized messages and you have a pretty good idea what you're going to hear - except for the important details.  

The major difference between today's contest and the one I wrote about in that article is that this one is for CW - Morse Code - operation only.  That means the CW is going to be fast.  I didn't tune around endlessly looking for stations to contact, but I'd guess the slowest sender I heard was in the range of 15 to 18 WPM. (The so-called WARC bands of 30, 17 and 12 meters are excluded from the contest, and I heard folks at lower speeds in those bands.)  Obviously, you need to know code well enough that you can use this for practice, but it doesn't hurt to listen to code that's faster than you're comfortable with.  A good thing about a contest as code practice is you can leave the radio on a guy that's sending too fast for you and know he's going to repeat his call again soon.  He'll repeat the whole exchange over and over. 

I should add that if you're trying to learn Morse code for the first time, you should be learning by sound, listening to letters that are sent too fast for you to count the dits and dahs, but spaced farther apart.  To learn five word per minute code (WPM) for a license test, for example, you'd use 15 WPM letters spaced far enough apart to make five WPM.  Whatever you do, don't do anything like the graphic meme I wrote about back in '16 when I first saw it.    

This is the description of the contest, an overview of the rules and requirements from the WA7BNM Contest Calendar (8-Day Calendar View) that shows what you need to know to play in this contest.

Just like the voice (SSB) version of the contest last March, the contest exchange is simple.  You'll give each other a signal report (it's really unusual to hear or send anything other than "599" - usually sent as "5NN") and either your state or province (if you're in Canada) or the operating power if you're in another country.  Let me modify the exchange I used last year for CW:

A contest exchange might be as short as this:
CQ CQ TEST, P42A
P42A DE W7CW BK
W7CW DE P42A 5NN KW BK
R R 5NN MT BK
W7CW QSL 73 DE P42A QRZ?

The abbreviation BK is sent as one continuous sound (dahdidididahdidah) interpreted as either "BREAK" or "BACK (to you)." The Q signals were referenced last year, too.  Need a refresher (pdf)?

I figure there might be two of you out there who would find this interesting, so there you go: a post on actually operating in a CW contest.