Do you have any in stock?
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Well I learned from Andy’s “rant” on the use of KN.
Thanks Andy!
Richard N2GBR.
Plain text in which language? The whole purpose of prosigns is to avoid needing to know 50 languages.
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I know.
But I’ll do what my English countrymen have done for years… instead of learning any foreign language I’ll key S-L-O-W-L-Y and L-O-U-D-L-Y 
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That’s my MO – stay out of the way until the pile up clears. I respect the Mobile Operators who have a short window to contact --voice, of course!
It is frustrating hearing operators who don’t care, disregard every convention in the book and shout I’M KING OF THE HILL.
Voice is challenging enough. CW carries a real burden and if an operator can’t respect the conventions, name him and shame him.
It is often heard emanating from the self-elected band police when there is a pile up for a DX station. I rarely usemail AS, preferring QRX which most callers seem to understand. I also use the ONLY word and send slowly. I think lowering your speed is an excellent way of getting callers to pay attention. Moving off a couple of kHz and calling again is a fallback position - the genuine and keen chasers will always find you, particularly if the RBN spots the change. However, why should an activator have to resort to such measures?
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Having read several different ways to have a quick QSO on CW for SOTA, and for the benefit of those new to activating using CW would the bare basics be something along the lines of…
CQ CQ CQ M0RSF/P M0RSF/P G/NP-010 K
M0RSF/P MM0FMF KN
MM0FMF MM0FMF 579 579 KN
M0RSF/P MM0FMF 559 559 KN
MM0FMF AR TU 73 SK
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I agree with you. I decided to learn CW so as to get those DX Sota QSO’s that I miss out on otherwise with just ssb. Ive only been at it a few months and its slowly paying off.
When I’m nervously sitting on a summit, or chasing from home and attempting CW at my very slow speed, all I want is a call sign and RST exchange in the simplest way possible, the stage I’m at anything else will quickly confuse me and we both could loose out. Unless I ask, I will already know the summit details so thats not important.
For callers answering a cq, the contest format of simply sending a callsign seems to work ok, but some operators find it confusing as they are unsure who is being called.
When acknowleding the caller, the abbreviation of leaving out the word DE is a fairly recent change. I use DE when I first acknowledge the caller and I send the caller’s callsign so all on frequency know who the report is intended for.
Usually there would be no need to use KN on any but the initial transmission to a specific caller.
I think there’s an error in your line that has the same callsign twice.
On most contacts I would use BK instead of KN, because (to me) KN only has meaning in the context of a reply to a spcific station, where there is ambiguity. Having established callsign Y is being called, the BK is sufficient at the end of a transmission.
But as you see, even a sample QSO is subject to personal preferences and habits. I’m not claiming I’m right or that anything else is “wrong”.
Ideally you would be prepared to accept anything after the RST report ranging from full callsign exchange including DE followed by K or KN all the way down to BK.
The main thing at present is to realise that everybody cannot copy everybody, band conditions are long and unreliable, so removing ambiguity is more important than fast contacts. Faster speeds don’t always increase the contact rate.
After all that, a method has to be adopted for correcting errors. If your caller sends their callsign more than once, it means they think you don’t have it right. So the best response to that is to send their callsign again at least once and ask QSL? BK to which the repsonse should be QSL TU etc. (or if they send their callsign again, they still don’t think you have it right.)
For SOTA, some ops always seem to request your summit reference. This should be done by REF? To which you reply REF G/NP-001 etc.
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At the Graz Morse Code School we focus on a range of Q codes, prosigns and abbreviations from the very first lesson. In particular, that other little understood non abbreviation: UP
73
Matt
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I vote for:
Stop sending for at least 60 seconds.
Slowly and deliberately in plain text P S E O N L Y G 3 ? or whatever several times.
Repeat as needed.
Works for me.
If all else fails, break out the flask and enjoy a brew while they all calm down a bit.
73 de Ian
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The problem I had last Wednesday (25/9/19) was that conditions, at least for single-skip, were good, so just about everyone was 599. However, it was difficult to prune respondents down to a single one. I’m sure I missed a few chasers because I couldn’t get down to just one callsign. I was using a wide filter because a bit of spread helps, but often the chasers are all just about perfectly zero-beat. If several call zero-beat at the same time…
I got enough good calls to qualify the summit three times over, but if the chasers had been a little less frantic I’m sure I could have worked quite a few more of them.
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What radio did you use? Does it have DSP / Crystal Filter or both? If not you need to invest some money in the job if you want to work at least one station a minute and at the same time keep the dog pile in check…
PS I wouldn’t recommend using a wide filter for SOTA CW unless you were on a clear band, working one station at a time and there was no pile up.
73 Phil
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I’m using a KX3, and by “wide” I mean about 500Hz. The trouble I was having was that chasers (multiple) were calling spot-on my frequency (so narrowing the filter to 50Hz didn’t help), and they were near enough equally strong, and my “XX0?” style attempts to thin the chasers down didn’t always work. On at least two occasions it took nearly 10 minutes to thin the pile-up down to one caller, and I’d be un-surprised to find some callers had worked each other thinking they were working me…
OK, I see, well your bandwidth was as it should be in my opinion. Catching a partial of a familiar call if you can’t get a full call is probably the best method in that case. For instance if I hear OK2 or PDT (only), I would then likely risk going back to OK2PDT, give his call twice and then didi dahdah didit or even risk giving him a report. You then hope that the rest of the callers standby (most do) and allow the OK2 or the PDT or hopefully OK2PDT to respond with his signal report to you. If no response then call QRZ again and hope this time that you can pick a solid callsign or even another partial our of the melee! Picking calls out of several needs practice if they are zero beat - try chasing from home, which is comfy, cozy and the easiest way to perfect the art rather than being sat hunched up on a hill often in an uncomfortable position.
Your only other option is to call CQ CQ SOTA DL/M0LEP/P DL/M0LEP/P UP 1 UP 1 K and then either use you clarifier or VFO B to tune the receiver to the wanted caller. This is always the practice used by rare country DXpeditions when there may be 100s of callers spread over a very wide spectrum indeed, leaving the DXpedition operator the opportunity to hear and log and pick individuals callers more easily. Give it a try if you feel confident enough - it may work for you.
73 Phil
Send UP1 and move, some will QSY faster and thus the pack thins. 10mins trying to pick one call out is far too long. Where the calls similar or did you have a buffoon who wasn’t listening to your directions?
It may become more common in SOTA if the hobby continues to grow and band conditions improve. However, I did hear one OM complain on air about split being used in the QRP section of the 40m band. With bandwidth at a premium, split operation takes up a lot if bandwidth. Perhaps we should advise people calling split to do so lower down the band, or keep the gap as small as possible.
73 de OE6FEG
Matt
When I worked in the RN the ‘normal’ way if multiple ships were calling in with messages was to send QRY 1 or 2 PSE AS + or what ever (Your turn is number…). whilst you then dealt with the 1st caller’s traffic and you worked each in turn in the order you’d given.
Places like Portishead Radio/GKB Nr Bristol, probably the world’s busiest radio stn at the time you’d hear the operators sometimes sending QRL QRY 15 or more when really busy on each band. (there was more than one operator working on each frequency band),
Obviously not very practical when exchanges on SOTA are normally very brief.
My 1st experience with my 1st, probably small pile up as an amateur doing SOTA left me rather perplexed and puzzled how to handle this surprise. When all went quiet someone sent their call in the brief silence. Got him!!, So thats what I do if I can’t make out anyone’s call - wait a second. Thats happened a couple of times since then and it seems to work for me - wait a second for the silence and someone will fill it with their callsign.
David P
M6GYU
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Or actually outright rude!
As well as the genuine well-mannered SOTA chasers I often find on 40m some hams who are too impatient to wait until they hear my callsign and send “QRZ?” or their callsign - usually with a 599+30 signal - in the middle of another person’s over.
I’m sorry to say it’s rather put me off 40m and so I now activate on 30m and 60m where they are still very civilized.
73 Andy
I used split operation when I worked with the special call sign OE15SOTA last week-end.
I had a nice pile-up on 7MHz CW that was soon more than I could handle. I decided to go split and announced “CQ UP 1”. There were some sharp operators on my new QRG immediately and I could work some QSOs in split mode with ease. Note that I sent “UP 1” after each QSO! After about 15 QSOs the callers thinned out and I returned to my original listening frequency (my TX frequency). To my surprise there were still a lot of callers there! The majority of SOTA Chasers had not understood that I was working split or did not bother to call higher up.
The result was that I was successfull in thinning out the callers but I never had a clear calling frequency. At least one purpose of going split had been achieved!
As Matt, OE6FEG, has mentioned a few lines further up we might see more split operation as the popularity of SOTA increases and propagation improves. Maybe we need some instructions to chasers to allow efficient split operation. We also need to agree on frequencies where we can try. 7.032MHz is not a good QRG to start split…
73 Heinz
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