Contesting, Contesters, and Contests

November 26th, 2007 by k8gu Leave a reply »

I cruised by eHam for the first time in a long time the other day.  As, I’ve mentioned here before, I left due to the low SNR and because the forums weren’t exactly, um, inspirational.  There was one of the perennial Contest-Anticontest threads raging in the Contesting forum.  The originator sarcastically “thanked” contesters for “trashing” the bands during the CQ WW CW contest last weekend.  I skimmed through the bashing from both sides until I got to a poster who said, “Thank you, contesters, for giving me some contacts.”

You’re quite welcome!  This guy knows what’s up.  He’s new to HF and had a terrible time making contacts outside of contests.  A lot of us started out in his shoes.  Honestly, when I first got on HF at 14, I didn’t feel like I had anything to say to older people on the radio—that’s why I left repeaterland.  Now that I’ve done some stuff, that’s different…but, I still like contesting.  Over the past five years, I’ve found friends that I’ve operated, built antennas, strategized, or just plain shook hands with.  Some of the most interesting people I know are contesters.  Tell me that ’59’ contacts are impersonal!

This is a great hobby.  Life is too short to bash any of your fellow hams!

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