NAQP CW & 2BSIQ Notes

I don't practice contesting techniques. I've tried Morserunner and other tools and I hate them all. It's just too fake for my tastes. That said, they work -- ask any top ranked contester. The only "practice" I get is live, on air, in contests.

I made a last minute decision to enter NAQP CW last weekend. This is a contest where you must do SO2R and especially 2BSIQ to place well. The contest is short and fast paced. It can be very intense since there is little leeway for mistakes. Pick the wrong band at the wrong time and you can't compensate for the mistake the next day.

Despite my previous so-called practice in the IARU contest I have hardly operated HF at all recently. Summer is sporadic E season, and that means monitoring and running FT8 on 6 meters all day, every day. Outside of these contests I had only a handful of CW contacts in June and July. With most of my antennas and rotators fixed I had little excuse, so I configured the station for SO2R and went into it cold.

My biggest lack was 160 meters. With no radials on the vertical during farming season and Beverages that seem to be suffering from difficulties (probably nothing more than corroded connectors) there was no reason to stay up late. Unlike other times I did this one for a straight 10 hours, from 2 PM local to midnight. I only made a handful of contacts on 160 since I was either not heard or I had difficulty copying stations. I wasn't fussed about it.

Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   28    14
   80:  168    38
   40:  379    53
   20:  311    50
   15:  224    46
   10:   12     5
-------------------
Total: 1122   206  Total Score = 231,132

Despite the flaws of the station and operator I did respectably well. You can check 3830 for how my score compares to the raw scores of others in the highly competitive SOABLP category. I joined a team but our total wasn't great since several excellent operators in our club were not available and others could only participate part time. Did I mention yet that it's summer?

The contest started slow for me. It took me at least an hour to get fully into SO2R and then 2BSIQ, and to finally abandon 10 meters. I tried for too long on 10 since my neglect of it in January hurt my score. This time trying too hard hurt my score. After those misfires the contest went more smoothly with a consistent rate of over 100 QSOs per hour. Not great but okay.

As in January, I did 2BSIQ as much as possible. That raised my rate but hurt multipliers. It could have been worse because, as usual, participation is lower in summer than winter. The reason is that a lack of callers meant that I frequently scoured the bands for stations to work -- run on one radio while S & P on the other -- which added both contacts and multipliers. You have to do this anyway if you want to work others who are mostly 2BSIQ since they'll never call you. That is, unless they're assisted and the runs dry up. I didn't worry about them too much since they are more likely to click-and-call me than I am to find them. Tactics are quite different for assisted and non-assisted operators.

I envy the Europeans. Overlapping NAQP was the European HF Championship that has similarities to NAQP. Although the contests are about the same length -- more of them used high power, could use SSB and CW and were (by default) assisted -- their QSO totals were impressive. I could hear many of the European big guns off the back of my yagis. I sometimes had to QSY to avoid QRM.

We just don't seem to have the numbers on CW in NA any more. I last noted how this hurts our global competitiveness in my article on the IARU contest. It also hurts us in domestic contests.

Timing woes

2BSIQ, and also conventional SO2R, can only succeed with carefully aligned transmissions. However the process of syncing can cause unwanted behaviour in callers and others. There are many ways to "force" alignment that are acceptable to others but not always. Here are a few I dealt with during NAQP.

• Hair trigger callers: Some people just won't wait. If you delay even half a second they call again. They are constantly doubling with me. There is little I can do to work them other than by annoying someone on the other radio, which I try not to do. If there's another caller I'll pick them up instead so that I can make progress. The hair trigger guy never sticks around when that happens. Rush, rush, rush.
• Point-and-click: Other callers send their call once and if they don't hear a reply in a second or two they vanish. I don't notice until I send the exchange to them and hear silence in response. I try again even though it is pointless. They have already clicked on another spot. These callers often click and call later so it isn't a big problem.
• Click and run: A few seconds silence encourages some to grab the frequency. They are not actively stealing the frequency, just not bothering to check first by sending "QRL?". Depending on the circumstances I'll either resume my run or QSY. Many of them will disappear when they hear my CQ. They may be rude but they also don't persist when they're called out.

While SO2R and 2BSIQ are beneficial for those practicing these techniques they are also of value to others. The reason is that more QSOs overall are made and that fills everybody's logs, raising scores across the board. There are still some who don't see it that way and are too sensitive to transmission delays. It's a contest and they are understandably impatient. Whatever the reason, it is necessary to deal with callers like that.

Chris VO2AC sent me recordings of my two QSOs with MB1A, the WRTC team for which he was referee. In one case I was 2BSIQ and in the other case I was running while hunting on a different band and called MB1A. I won't include the recordings in this article since there is nothing noteworthy about them. It was interesting to hear the transmission delays as I waited for the transmission on the other radio to end.

In these cases the delay was brief, indicating smooth 2BSIQ and SO2R timing. That doesn't cause problems. Most contesters have learned to wait that fraction of a second for the SO2R operator to get to them. It would have been more interesting to have a recording where the timing goes awry. I'd find it painful listening but also instructive.

Call history fills and errors

I use pre-fills from a call history file to save typing. I favour any tool that makes 2BSIQ easier. The danger of the pre-fill is that many contesters don't check that it matches what is sent by the other station. That will earn them many errors, and they'll deserve every one of them. There's no excuse for it.

I use the call history file that is compiled by VE2FK and is easily imported with N1MM+ and other major contest logging applications. It is possible to make your own call history file from the logs of previous editions of the same contests, but I never do; I like the low effort convenience of Dub's files. No call history file can be entirely correct and it is of no interest to me whether an incorrect pre-fill was my fault or somebody else's! I watch, copy and override where necessary.

It is interesting that perhaps 5 to 10 call signs when entered during NAQP received a "?" indicating that they are not in the SCP (super check partial) database, yet when I moved to the exchange fields there was a call history pre-fill. That's unusual. I have no explanation.

However, when a call is not in the SCP and there is no call history pre-fill I question whether I copied the call correctly. Although I send the call when responding with my exchange it is a sad fact that many will not correct their call. I have to explicitly ask them to repeat their call when I run into this situation. In most of these cases I found that I had indeed copied their call incorrectly. 

A mistake I made was not to have a function key pre-programmed to send "cl?" or "call?" Keyboard and paddle CW is awkward in a contest, and with SO2R can easily be sent on the wrong radio depending on context and timing.

Error rate

It's certainly too soon to know my error rate for this contest. That will come out in due time. My hope is that I performed better than in the January NAQP CW where my error rate was over 2%. 2BSIQ is no excuse for that, and indeed there is never an acceptable excuse.

Instead I'll talk about my errors in CQ WPX CW in May this year. The result were just published and participants were sent their LCR (log check reports). Of the approximately 700 contacts in my log there were 9 errors, for an error rate of 1.3%. That's not too bad for a contest with (unpredictable) serial numbers, but still a little higher than my 1% objective.

Of those 9 errors, none were for call sign errors and 3 were for NIL (not in log). I am pleased with the former and there is no easy way to determine whether the latter were due to my error or theirs. So let's look at those 6 exchange errors; that is, serial numbers.

21048 CW 2026-05-30 1701 VE3VN  0244   G4R    0100  correct   200
14049 CW 2026-05-30 1918 VE3VN  0299   OM5MX  0129  correct   127
14029 CW 2026-05-30 2121 VE3VN  0311   SN7O   0792  correct   892
14036 CW 2026-05-31 1130 VE3VN  0453   SP4TKR 0103  correct  1034
14029 CW 2026-05-31 1941 VE3VN  0594   UW8SM  2196  correct  1196
 7018 CW 2026-05-31 2341 VE3VN  0685   DK6SP  2074  correct  2064

The copying errors were almost all due to dits. I'm not surprised. At high CW speeds, QRM and QRN, and SO2R it is quite easy to lose or add a dit. I'll just have to be more careful. Really that means more operating and thus more practice. It is not practical and is poor procedure to constantly send their number back to them with a "?" appended. That should only be done when truly in doubt. I was not in doubt, just wrong. I don't even have the weak excuse that the low bands are noisy since all but one were on 15 and 20 meters.

Of course it isn't just me. Countless time during the contest my call was copied as VE3UN. I had it removed from SCP by Bill W9KKN yet the incidence of this error has not diminished. I correct it when I hear the error but I also suffer many unwanted dupes. They hurt my rate which lowers my score. There is little I can do about the errors made by others.

Coming up

I am seriously considering operating in this weekend's WAE CW contest. I've never done it before. I've been reading the N1MM+ documentation on sending QTC, which tries really hard to make it easy. I expect I'll make mistakes anyway. Hopefully I won't confuse or slow down others too badly. If I do enter it will only be a brief effort to get a taste of how it is done. Any serious effort will wait for another year.