I understand how Jim and Ken feel. However, I find myself on both sides of the fence. Sometimes I get antsy wanting to work a particular grid square, but other times I get into a longer exchange--maybe the other station is in a location of particular interest, or whatever. Of course, not many folks are that hungry for my grid square, but I suppose they may be hungry for the other person's grid square. Thing is, though, not everyone (me included) is knocking themselves out trying to grab "all" the grid squares. I save that approach for the contests usually. Different folks have different ways of enjoying the opening, and a little chit-chat may be how they do it. So, maybe we all just need to take a deep breath.
Jim's absolutely right about the CW portion of the band. It's usually "all business" down there, and lots of fun too. Weak signals are much easier to grab, etc. My biggest complaint about the CW "portion" is that we seemed to be squeezed into a fairly narrow segment--50,090 to 50,100. I realize we can go further up or down, but most don't seem to do it. Also you start running into the beacons when you get lower, and when the band is good, there are a bunch of them coming in. Nevertheless, I do go down lower sometimes, but my QSO rate drops because others don't seem to be listening down further. Going up apparently "infringes" on a DX window for SSB. Anyway, I think we should spread out some, downward probably, when the band gets good like this, beacons or no beacons. That's probably heresy! Of course, I'd also like to hear a lot more folks try CW too! Dave W7AQK ----------------------------------------------------- Jim Brown wrote: On Mon, 5 Jul 2010 08:29:08 -0700 (PDT), Ken McGuire wrote: >I was frustrated at how slow the chats were on SSB (FM was >even worse) - >it seemed like they were wasting a perfectly good band >opening ragchewing Yep. Same here. Often, an opening on any given path may be there only long enough to exchange the grid and report. It's quite frustrating to wait to call a station that was S9, then S7, then S5, then S3, then fumes, while the time is filled with innanity. >When I turned down to the CW portion of the band, it almost >sounded like >a CW contest weekend. Yes. I've gotten to the point that I spend most of my 6M efforts on CW, only tuning up to the SSB portion of the band when nothing is happening on CW. And thanks in part to the proliferation of K3s, there is a lot more CW activity than there was only 5 years ago. 73, Jim K9YC ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
