I've heard it said that some contest stations deliberately transmit a wider-than-necessary signal to keep competitiors away from "their" channel.
I personally would not intentionally transmit a "wide" signal during a contest. It would, imho, be counterproductive, apart from any other reasons.
On the small 40m band in Europe, during large contests, you almost can not avoid stations sitting on top of each other and/or overlapping. Even if I assume that there were no BC stations between 7100kHz and 7200kHz and that a channel is only 2.5kHz wide, between 7040kHz and 7200kHz one only has space for 63 running stations without any conflicts arising, or using the older limits of 7040kHz to 7100kHz space for 23 SSB signals. Here there will always be a certain amount of elbowing going on. If one considers all the high powered phase noise being radiated and so on, then even a 9+20 signal can be a weak signal when compared to "40m contest noise" levels. And finding gaps between stations can be a real art.
This is why you want to have a signal with a very high average power level, but one which is also not wider than necessary.
vy 73 de toby _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
