Collegiate Championship CW

de WM5R

The University of Texas Amateur Radio Club operated in the 2000 Collegiate Championship, CW. This contest coincides with the ARRL November Sweepstakes, and the CW weekend was 4-5 November. Monique N3TNN, Johanna W5JLP, Louisa KB5LBN, Kevin KT5I, and Ken WM5R operated. The phone weekend will be 18-19 November, and N5XU will again be on the air for that weekend, as well.

Most of this contest, we called CQ in the 15-18 WPM range. Kevin can go much faster than this, and for the little bit when he was operating, our rate was much better, but our other four operators are all still in the 13-18 WPM comfort range. Since almost nobody else in the contest is going that speed, the only way to make more than a few shaky contacts is to go way up the band and call CQ. Unfortunately, the majority of operators (including many well-known contesters and a former ARRL president) answered our CQs at speeds faster than us, and in many case much faster than us. Last year, I thought it was a vast majority, so maybe more people are slowing down to meet our speed. Still, plenty of people who should have known better answered at 23-25 WPM or higher.

There seemed to be a lot of QRPers on the air this weekend. Way more than last year. This made things a little tougher, as many answered our CQs with very weak signals. Also, I noticed a lot of signals, predominantly from the QRP ops, but also sometimes from A ops, with very bad character spacing and weighting. I don't know if they are trying to be helpful, or they're just clueless, or what. I heard dahs that were everywhere from 1.5 to 7 dit lengths long. One VE3 in particular was going at exactly my speed, was loud enough, and would have been an easy QSO, but his dahs were about 7 dit lengths long, and it was like a whole other language to me! There were still other QRPers sending in an extreme Farnsworth-style. In one case, the average speed was about 17WPM, but the individual characters were being sent at 30-35WPM! I don't remember this proliferation of CW wierdness last year. Maybe those operating lower in the bands didn't encounter so much of this.

A view of the Texas Capitol from atop the N5XU tower.

Since we couldn't really ``search and pounce'' much, we relied upon the mults finding us when we called CQ. Happily, most of them did, but it still wasn't a clean sweep. We missed the Northwest Territories/Yukon Territory/Nunavut section, Alberta, Quebec, Puerto Rico, and Arkansas.

We stopped about forty minutes before the end, because of the storms rolling in (between the radio static and the rain pounding on the AC unit in the window, it was getting hard to hear anything, and we started seeing lightning,) and because the rotor stuck to the SW right after working KH8/N5OLS, and because I was exhausted, and I was the only one left.

Band	QSOs	Points	Mults
40CW	47	94	9
20CW	158	316	17
15CW	183	366	32
10CW	83	166	17
Total	471	942	75

Claimed score

70,650

Texas A&M W5AC was also on the air this year, and it looks like N5XU has thrashed them soundly. Unfortunately, Baylor University WA5BU looks to have produced a better score than ours, for only the second time in 13 Collegiate Championship weekends. We will need to have a solid performance on phone to retain the Big XII conference title!