The hard core contesters would lose their minds if they had to send a few extra dits or dahs. That might cost them a couple of QSOs per hour! 
You are so right. Gotta keep up the rate! You can’t mess around too much at 200 QSOs per hour !
When ragchewing, I use to send both together at the end of my transmission. Typically I finish my message with HW? AR K or KN or BK. I have a number of different formulas, which I improvise depending on the way the QSO is going.
Nothing to do with what I send in contest or in a SOTA pileup.
In these days there are more and more hams jumping from one spot to other and exchanging just callsign and 599 TU while there are less and less hams making ragchewing QSOs.
Those doing the former only will never learn real CW and they miss the pleasure of making ragchewing QSOs on CW.
I’ve been doing ragchewing CW QSOs over my 35 years as a CW operator and it’s something I still enjoy doing.
I’ve been doing it on 3.525 over the last few days at about 22-23z and I’ve been chatting with some of my regular chasers and also activators. A real pleasure indeed that I recommend to anyone.
73,
Guru
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Right. I am probably going to get shot down to hell for this but I have to say it rather than think it. Do Sota CW operators think they’re so so special and way above mere mortals ? because reading all this it certainly comes across that way. Yes I agree that protocols must be followed for it to work successfuly and I also agree that one can learn an awful lot by listening. but come on guys Sota is supposed to be fun isn’t it ? or is it just open to the select few ? I love to do CW but I certainly won’t be doing it anymore on Sota as there are too many pedanjtic folks and I know for a fact I am not the only one who feels that rather than upset the so called elite the best bet is to just not use cw on Sota. Don’t you realize you’re scaring folks away ? Rant over.
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Hi
I fully understand your frustration.
About operational quality of operators in general and SOTA chaser one can write complete books.
My own experience as a qrp SOTA chaser when sending my call, the pile up is regularly so dense that keeping in mind the weak signal of the activator, it is completely impossible to hear the reply of the activator, what station he is coming back to. So I limit the sending of my call to a maximum of twice.
To give an example I sent my call, in the turbulence of the pile up The only thing I can hear from the activator is that he is coming back to a station O.4…A I think it is normal that in such case I sent my call again.
More of a problem are stations that cannot wait until the activator sends his 73 tu indicating the completion of the qso.
Two things help as a chaser: the rhytm of the activator: how often after 73 tu does he give his call and or reference?
When the activator knows the chaser well because of regular contacts:
The activator hears ON4?CA in the pile up but makes the educated guess that its me ON4BCA and comes back with gm Patrick 559, to which I reply to cfm his guess:
De ON4BCA gm ur 559 73 tu
to which he replies:
cfm 73 tu
Yes. It sounds like desperation. “Oh please answer me!”
hi Allen,
if an ssb operator does not know the abbreviations that are commonly used on CW, the discussion above may appear to be foreign and even elitist. but it is no more elitist than ssb operators using terms such as “seventy three” and “old man”. A newcomer to amateur radio would be astonished to hear all the jargon used, the Q codes, the numeric codes, even the phonetic alphabet is foreign to people who don’t use it.
All of the procedural terms above are in common use on CW. They are not unique to SOTA contacts. In many ways, SOTA usage is a subset of general usage. Hence my suggestion that a subset of the wider list of prosigns and abbreviations could be adopted so that newcomers would only need to become familiar with the subset rather than the whole list.
Using abbrevations is essential to save time. It is not done to create a secret code. No CW operator has time to send literally “roger there Allan, thanks for the contact, see you next time, best wishes. Bye” they will simply send RR tnx qso Allan CUAGN 73
every modes has its special codes, the digital modes have standards, RTTY ops use some different codes from ssb and cw, no doubt other modes have unique characteristics too. EME practices are nothing like what are used on HF.
73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2UH
Andrew, like you I ‘grew up’ with, learnt and used most of the Q codes, prosigns and ham abbreviations but sadly I think we are fighting a losing battle.
So nowadays, I’m reluctant to use the less-frequently used ones in a QSO with an op who clearly doesn’t appear to know them. Of course, this leads to less efficient communications [in terms of characters sent] but clarity of meaning is uppermost in my mind. It’s like with experts, they can talk in jargon for efficiency but need to use plain language when talking to non-experts.
73 [there I go again when it’s written English]
Andy
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I don’t know if all CW operators know what KN means, but I learned what KN means back in the early 1960’s when studying to be a ham, and though I’ve never made a CW contact I have never forgotten it. There seems to be various schools of thought about the correct use of prosigns, but anything that works is good. The real problem is that the disruptive operators probably DO know what KN means, but are so carried away by the urgent need to make the contact that they forget or ignore the tenets of good operating. This is as much a phone problem as it is a CW one, rowdy SSB pile-ups are a fact of life. It is the same state of mind that has people fighting over sales bargains. Its a problem that will not go away no matter how much we complain.
Yes, and you’re not only one who has said so in this thread. The true issue when I posted this 22 months back was an operator who persistently ignored a directed call to another station. I thought that station should know better and emailed him later about operating standards. I email lots of people who act like an entitled pratt on air and ask them why they behave the way they do. To a man (it’s always men, YL ops seem to all be 1st class ops) they reply “oh I couldn’t hear you well” which is complete nonsense. If you can’t hear the DX, keep quiet until you are sure there is nobody else being worked. In this case the email reply said I wasn’t being heard too well which I know is mince because when I sent the QRMing station’s call he came back at once with a good report for me!
And Allen, you have completely misread this whole thread. Let me tell you why you are wrong. This is not about elitism but egalitarianism. It’s not about being perfect on air, but behaving well on air so not just the aggressive and persistent callers can bully their way to a QSO but so EVERY caller gets a QSO on a fair basis.
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“Take that down, Darling. Make a note of the phase. I like it. I want to use it more often in conversation.”
Would that be a POTA chaser? 
No, that’s already reserved for Pillocks on the Air!
Another excellent term of abuse
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One that the moderator might take down should he see fit to moderate himself…
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Most dictionaries list it as informal/slang/derogatory but not offensive or strong.
Looking further back than contempory British English, Prat was a 16th century word for buttock, and pillock was derived from pillicock, an old word for penis. If this was a 16th century reflector I would be obliged to moderate both words, but as we are using contemporary English I shall let them pass.
Both original meanings continue in a way, think of “pratfall” and of course one of the most frequently used slang terms for a penis.
Oh come on, Tom! You know it’s a mild term of abuse [I conclude that when my wife’s calls me it]
G8CPZ, you are so right! Another one that is heard a lot is
“Please copy”… I guess that’s mostly on (ugh)SSB.
AR means “End of transmission”
K means “Invitation to send”, or “go ahead”.
R means “Received” or “Roger”, No need to send “CFM” or “QSL”, that’s just a long way of saying “R”.
This topic was automatically closed after reaching the maximum limit of 100 replies. Continue discussion at Do all CW operators know what the CW prosign KN means? (Part 2).