Food for thought ! Is my memory failing me, or do I remember a time when DXpeditions used to have CW ops that could churn out QSOs at a rate of 150-180 an hour, hour after hour with virtually no drama and with a reasonable knowledge of propagation?
With the odd exception, all l hear now is an operator that is like a rabbit caught in a car's headlights, hopelessly trawling across 15-20KHz of a boiling pileup for 30-40 seconds before managing to extract a two letter fragment of a call sign, throw it back at the pileup with 599 tacked on the end, fully expecting this to result in a QSO. Then throw in a few time saving "tricks" such as sending at 40wpm, with a speeded up RST, only sending his call every 15 minutes, sending "dit dit" where clearly a "TU DX1DX UP" is needed, abandoning QSOs halfway through, not confirming a queried call correction, insisting on working an area to which there is no propagation on the strength of working one superstation there, working by numbers etc etc. What a mess! The result?....... a situation where only the Loud, Lucky and the continuous calling Lid prosper. It seems the quality of an operation is now judged by the speed the QSOs can be uploaded to LOTW, Clublog or the like, rather than the skill of the operator. Perhaps a small scale operation from a less needed entity, or a few hours using "Pileup runner" would give these guys an idea what to expect before launching themselves off to a rare one. I just can't imagine what pleasure they can derive from operating like this......a bit like me trying to conduct a symphony orchestra and expecting it to be alright on the night! 73 Steve G4EDG ----------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe or subscribe to this list. Please send a message to imail...@njdxa.org In the message body put either unsubscribe dx-news or subscribe dx-news This is the DX-NEWS reflector sponsored by the NJDXA http://njdxa.org -----------------------------------------------------------
