That’s QRO!
Fast sending by an activator probably does increase the QSO rate but fast sending by chasers slows the QSO rate.
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I think you will find it generally holds true that the speed someone can copy Morse is limited by the thinking time. The more you practice and once you “get” the basics, there isn’t really any thinking time up to your personal limit. You are able to recognise the letters as you hear the patterns, you no longer hear dah-di-dah-di and then think “er yes that’s a er C”. You hear dah-di-dah-di and you know C. But if you go faster you reach a point where that stops and you need thinking time to effectively look-up in you Morse memories what the letter is.
So you will find someone who can do say 14wpm all correctly spaced, will only copy the first character or two if they try to copy 20wpm. They need the thinking time adding in. So your 14wpm person will happily copy 20wpm characters with 14wpm spacing between characters. And that is what I do when someone calls me at less than my comfortable 20wpm speed, I send at 20wpm and put bigger gaps in. There is a grey-zone where 20wpm characters and 14wpm spacing, for example, works. But there will be people who are not yet at that speed. That’s when I do the chaser moral boosting speed adjust where I send continuous dots and twiddle the speed knob down to their speed and work them at say a real 12wpm. Hearing someone deliberately slow down for you gives most of the slower senders a boost, it means the activator is putting in more effort to work a slower chaser.
My late good friend, Dave G3UFO, was a maritime radio officer for many years. He said he used to send all his traffic at 15wpm AND NO REPEATS. Sure he could go faster (he did his ham CW at 25-28wpm) and so could many shore stations but the point was to send an accurate message and 15wpm meant the traffic was sent and received first time, every time.
There do seem to be some chasers who always call me very much faster than I am sending and I need a few attempts to copy their call. I just don’t understand that despite me sending a partial of their call, say ZZ5? kn a few times , obviously slowing the QSO rate right down, they don’t insert some delay between the letters. If they don’t slow down I eventually cut my losses and send “R R R RST 579 579 73 TU k” and I don’t log them.
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But they will log you and get the points, and if you care enough you will check the DB and see what their call was, so all is well… 
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Remember the asterisk which used to be a bone of contention, but it had a purpose
It did indeed and I miss it.
Yes and that purpose was it created deliberately inaccurate chaser logs. And it also slowed down the DB dramatically. 12 years ago when it was turned off, the DB was always on the raggedy edge of timing out on user requests. Now with the amount of traffic and the volume of users we’d spend our entire day answering reports that chaserlogs are not displaying.
So for Nth time (where is an f-big number)
- It didn’t do what it was intended to do
- It massively slowed the DB performance
- It’s not coming back
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Sorry if mentioning it opened an old wound. I certainly wasn’t asking for it to be reinstated.
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Hmm Richard, you might be getting a reputation for trying to catch people out (thinking, “iambic paddles”). I didn’t say “a QRP station”.
With the maximum power allowed by our license, 10W is low power by any reasonable definition. Otherwise, one would have to say anything >5W is high power, which is absurd.
Remember, the original definitions of QRO and QRP meant to do with increasing or decreasing power respectively, and not to do with any specific power level.
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Oh well, I guess not everyone will appreciate my sense of humour.
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What was the asterisk?
The asterisk was a means of confirming chases on the database through the comparison of the chaser entry against the activation log. It gave chasers assurance that the contact had been made, but needed the activator to actually submit a log. As Andy advised, it required a lot of resource.
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Gerald is right in that that was the intention, it was matching the entry of the chaser’s callsign in the activator’s log for the summit to their chaser log.
The match was quite slack as ISTR it only matched summit and date. So you could log you chased on 20m CW at 1100am and the activator would log you on 40m SSB at 1130am and that would be considered a match.
HOWEVER (that’s in capital letters for a reason)…
There were a significant number of chasers who cheated to get a star because they believed it was some kind of elixir of life and without stars they would wither and die.
What typically happened (I will use myself as the example)
- I would activate as MM0FMF/P and I would send MM0FMF/P in my QSOs.
- I would muck up my log and log as MM0FMF
- Everyone who logged me as MM0FMF/P would not a get star even though their call was in my log but MM0FMF and MM0FMF/P didn’t match.
What happened then just makes me shake my head and cry:
- They would chase the me and log me as MM0FMF/P
- Then the chaser would check for a star and because I had mucked up, there was no star.
- Then in full on dumbass-mode some would edit their chase log and change the call to MM0FMF even though they know they heard me send MM0FMF/P The rules of ham radio are you log what you hear not what you need to get a star.
- They would get their star and they would bathe in their elixir of life. And the log was now wrong!
- Then I would note my error and fix that and these magical stars went away.
- Yes, there were some who then edited their logs again to get the star back.
We (the MT) told chasers time and time and time and time and time and time and time again
that the lack of the confirmation star did not mean their chase log was invalid or that the lack of the confirmation star meant that we would query their claim for awards. But a significant number
of people did this rendering the validity of the logs questionable due to logging what was needed not was exchanged/heard.
So I told everyone the next person to edit their log to get a star because of a typo in the activator log would trigger me to remove the feature. Some numbnuts tweaked their log for a star and I switched the feature off. It’s not like people had not be warned what would happen.
Now people log what they (think) they heard. Apart from our regulars with magic ears who log QSOs that didn’t happen. We know who you are by the way 
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I must be operating in a different way then because I usually have a contest style pile up. I find that just as the pile starts to thin out, there’ll be another burst of activity from stations signing with ‘44’, I’m guessing that I’ve been spotted on some cluster with WWFF info.
Once the pile up finishes, I send a couple of CQs, if no answer, I QSY or QRT. I find that my QSO rate is much better at a faster speed, I’ve heard several stations call me at one time and I’ve picked one out and worked them, occasionally some of the other callers go away, presumably they’re thinking they can’t be bothered to wait. It’s frustrating being a chaser when it takes forever to get in the activator’s log, if QSOs at going at 1 to 2 call signs per minute, you can reasonably expect to score a QSO quite quickly.
I don’t mean to discourage new operators, if I get a caller using slow speed, I always try to increase the gaps between the characters. I also cut down the information exchange. I’m not good at conversational Morse myself anyway, my skills are purely based on SOTA activating.
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What I find really bizarre…
→ Experience the same often.
usually the /P station is pretty strong, and I answer “k” to encourage them to send the call but they repeat the /P over and over again.
Gave up to educate them, I just send the “/P” and then they send their call… Often they have a fantastic skip distance / good radiation situation on the summit so a normal call with their callsign would be enough and would speed up the procedure… I like to make several QSOs per minute and then changing band or continue hiking… Maybe some read this…
73 andy DL2DVE
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Wow! You must give me your recipe. I often have a pile-up (i.e. one or more calling chasers with no breaks between QSOs) but not usually. Maybe it’s the band(s) you work, or the time of day / day of the week. Also, this year I’ve focussed on 10m and I’m not getting pile-ups at all.
I can send & receive faster (than my usual 18-19wpm) but choose not to (for the reasons mentioned above). What word speed (or range of speeds) do you use?
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That’s to be expected. But on 30m (your favourite band?) pile-ups are pretty standard.
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“standard”? It might be we differ slightly on what we consider a pile-up. Also, I have skipped doing 30m if I’m too cold after having done 10m. [If anyone cared to look at my uploaded logs, my on-summit times seem to be shorter on average, in many cases a lot shorter, that most other activators.]
Yes, 30m is my favourite band in part because I’m pretty much guaranteed to get more than enough chasers to qualify the activation, and often, within a minute of my going on-air or posting a self-spot [usually sooner with the latter] I often get a string of chasers calling simultaneously. If that continues without a break - up to the point where I feel the need to call CQ again - I consider that was a pile-up.
So, would you consider 3 or 4 chasers worked that way a pile-up? Or, does it have to be more chasers or last longer than a few minutes? I have ones with 10+ callers [which to me is definitely a pile-up] but after that I’ll need to call CQ a few times and then there’s another burst of activity (usually less intense). But it’s different every time.
I suppose I should watch a few YouTube videos of other folk’s activations to see what their pile-ups are like.
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For any doubting Thomases out there, I witnessed exactly this on Colin’s activacion of G/SP-014, Longridge Fell - Spire Hill, last Thursday. Colin was spotted on 30m by RBNHole at 10:38. I listened to Colin work 17 stations in 13 minutes, whilst waiting patiently for our QSO at 10:53. I thoroughly enjoyed listening and learnt a lot.
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I don’t do contests so I’ve little comparison but i’d call that a pile up! It only takes two or three ops (CW) to transmit at the same time to sound like a massive pile, when in reality it all goes quiet after you’ve answered only the two or three callers (or maybe the rest have cleared off waiting?~`)
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