A frequent complaint, sadly from many Old Timers who should know better, is that the bands are full when there is a major (or any) CW Con Test taking place.
This is only true for the CW EXCLUSIVE sections of the bands on the non-WARC bands, which is what the issue is about: e.g. 80, 40, 20, 15 and/or 10m.
Have they forgotten that the CW band ends at the very top of the SHARED SSB section? For example, CW on 20m is 14000-14350, on 15m is 21000-21450.
When you find a (major) contest taking place and you want to use the band for non-contest QSO, why are you restricting yourself to the bottom end?
As the RSGB President rightly pointed out in an open letter in Radcom, there is no problem, simply go up into the SHARED SSB section – the entire SSB section is shared with CW, have we forgotten?
Old Timers seem to have forgotten the band plans and newcomers don’t seem to bother to check them.
The “SSB bands” (in reality SSB shared with CW bands – since there is NO exclusive SSB band) are generally empty these days, akin to CW outside of Con Test times, with most hams having moved to mobile phones, Internet, or FT8.
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2 thoughts on “Bands are EMPTY during CW Contests”
While this is very true, the problem is that you won’t find anyone for a CW QSO there. Even the skimmers are not watching there, so you won’t appear on RBN and any cluster.
Exactly. Not appearing in RBN (though cannot avoid manual entries into clusters) can be considered an advantage. A return to the good old days when people tuned around to find stations to call. It makes sense from a QRM standpoint to be using the top end of the bands, since the bottom ends are infested with SSB pirates, increasing digital invasions (including Digital CW) and 5NN type activities. All it takes is for the thousands of human CW operators to make the shift. A good starting point would be weekends, since there are almost always contests, and at least on 14340-349 even this one band. What say?