Notes from a Small Station
Joe Chester M1MWD tries to draw some conclusions about activity from contest statistics.
Joe Chester M1MWD tries to draw some conclusions about activity from contest statistics.
As I’ve said often enough, I’m not into contests. Never entered one, no intention either. But one day last week, my Elecraft system started to misbehave during a morning 80m net. Every time I pushed the PTT the frequency shifted 0.5kHz. And the SWR went through the roof. So, I switched off, intending to check out the system later. Suddenly it was 1900UTC, so I switched on, found a quiet spot and tuned up the rig. Everything looked fine, so I decided to give away a few points in the RSGB 80m Club Contest that evening.
I was surprised to be able to work ten stations, more or less in quick succession, in less than 15 minutes of operation. So clearly, there is nothing obvious wrong with my setup. A couple of days later I tried the net again, but conditions were very poor, and though I was heard on various web SDRs, I switched off to await better conditions. What was wrong on that Monday morning net? Where did the high SWR come from? Why was the KX3 jumping frequency? To be honest, I have no idea, but it’s all working now.
QSO Rate
Stray thought? Have you done any contesting? If so, how well did you do? No, I’m not asking if you won the thing, or won anything. But I am curious about something that appeared briefly in these notes several months ago. I am interested in what I will describe as the QSO rate of contesters, i.e. how many QSOs are you making in an hour, say?
Now there is a website, with numbers, but bear with me for now. My ‘score’ was 10 in 15 minutes, or 40 an hour (if I had stayed on for that long). I think QSO rate is a really interesting measure of system performance − that is antenna, feeder, matching unit, transceiver, plus of course the operator, and conditions. Clearly if propagation is poor, then the QSO rate should suffer accordingly. This statement may not be quite what it appears, as you will see later. Let me further state that I’m interested in SSB contacts only. For CW operators the QSO rate is a variable feast, depending on how fast they can send. And I have heard of operators doing 80WPM, while reading a newspaper, and having a cup of tea and a chat with a colleague at the same time, although that does sound a bit of an exaggeration to me. But clearly a 10WPM operator is going to have a lower QSO per hour than a 40WPM operator.
But this factor, CW speed, drops out of consideration if we focus solely on SSB. There is not much difference between fast and slow talkers saying just 59 73! Which brings me to the interesting point here. What is the absolute maximum number of SSB QSOs an operator could make in an hour of operation? Let’s make this easier. Assume the contacts are there waiting for the QSO, and that conditions are very good, so no significant QSB, or QRN or QRM either. If I, a rank amateur in the world of contesting (and in much else besides!), can do a QSO every minute and a half, what can the avid contesters do? And what is the absolute maximum that could be achieved? If CW people can imagine 80WPM, then could an SSB operator do one every second? 3600 QSOs in an hour? Wow! Maybe this is too much to contemplate. So, what about one every five seconds − go on, time it yourself. How long does it take to say “QRZ”, listen to a callsign, then repeat that callsign and add “59 73 136”. That last number is the serial, required in most contests. I think five to six seconds might be enough. Giving us a maximum achievable QSO rate of something like 600 contacts an hour. Now remember I specified perfect conditions for this experiment.
In actual fact, I think this idea would make for a very nice ‘contest’ for a club evening. Bit of a laugh anyway. And you don’t need to keep it up for an hour, a ten-minute window per participant should be enough. I will leave you to design the experimental setup, which shouldn’t be too difficult. Other club members could throw their callsigns at the volunteer and see how many ‘QSOs’ he can make in ten minutes. You mightn’t even need to go on air! But back to reality.
I mentioned a website, it’s: www.cqww.com/rates
Here are listed the best hourly QSO rates of the participants in the CQ WW Contest, from 2004 to 2020. These are listed separately for the various contest categories, e.g. single operator, QRP, and various classes of multi-operator stations. Some numbers to consider. In the single
operator category, the highest achieved rate in all of these years was 8P5A, operated by
Tom W2SC, with 407 contacts an hour in 2015. Now you can look at this in various ways. That rate means a completed contact every 8.5 seconds. I don’t think this is averaged over the 48 hours of the contest, but his best hour during the contest. Now don’t ask me how the guy could keep this level of operating for up for 48 hours. But the result for the hour in question is there in that table. For your information, the hour in question was actually the first hour of the contest that year, 24 October 2015, and it’s also interesting that he sat on one frequency, 14.328MHz for the whole hour, no search and pounce work. For those interested in how contesters get high scores in contests these two points may be of interest.
Another interesting piece of data comes from the QRP participants. John P40A, in Aruba, or KK9A, his US callsign, achieved 289 contacts per hour in 2004, over 70% of that of the full power station. How absolutely fabulous was that score, then? Who says life’s too short for QRP? And at the other extreme, if I look up the multimulti people, I see that CN2AA did 1012 an hour, also in 2015, just short of two and a half times the single operator rate. But there were twelve operators with several transceivers at this station.
Further Analysis
I did some further analysis on this data as I’m curious about how the QSO rate varies year on year. Surely there must be some effect from the variable propagation conditions, and also from improvements in the technology in the various transceivers in use?
The data here is less than convincing. Over the 17 years for which there is data in this table, the winners averaged around the 372 mark, the lowest winner being CU2X in 2008 with 333 QSOs per hour. I thought there would be a wider variation. You might think that transceiver performance would have improved over this length of time, or that propagation effects would be noticeable. But it’s not that clear, to me anyway. In fact, if anything it is saying that these two factors have had relatively little impact on these performances.
The last solar maximum was about 2004, where this table starts. And the data runs right through to the solar minima, the minima of 2009 and 2020. A trend is just discernible, matching the solar cycle (see my attempt at graphing these in the handdrawn graph). But these operators are still managing an average of 370 or so contacts an hour every year. And how then to explain 2011 and 2012? So, I suspect that, overall, it must come down to the skill of these operators.
From which I immediately generalise. To have fun on air, you don’t need the very best transceiver. Furthermore, and I am guilty of saying this both in this magazine and elsewhere, you don’t need the very best of propagation conditions either.
Even when propagation is poor, there are still lots of stations out there waiting for your CQ call. Let’s see if I can give you a few key sentences to chew on. The first is that once again, QRP operators do very well in comparison to their high-powered cousins. I know nothing about the exact conditions when these results were achieved but managing to make close to 300 contacts an hour is quite a statement. Secondly, 8P5A’s extraordinary rate is only two thirds of my estimate above of the theoretical maximum achievable for a single operator.
Of course, the team of twelve easily exceeded this, almost twice over. However, I think I would be tempted to revise my theoretical performance figure downwards. Which probably means that these operators are reaching the maximum rate achievable practically. But still a long way from my exceedingly modest 40!
And finally, overall propagation conditions have only very little impact on the QSO rates being achieved. So why exactly are people saying day after day that there is no one on the air because conditions are poor?