It had to happen - RoPoCo Contest Dumbed Down AGAIN!

If it wasn't bad enough to change my once favourite twice-yearly short CW contest "RoPoCo" (Rotating Post Codes)  into a CW/SSB contest, the RSGB have now in their infinite wisdom completed the dumbing-down process and changed this into something which is now called "RoLo" (Rotating Locator).

The whole essence of the contest in its original format is that it was a test of both sending and receiving CW skill.

UK postcodes have a slightly quirky format in that the number of letters and numbers in the first part of the code is inconsistent, being either one or two letters followed by either one or two numbers.  The second part of the code (separated on paper by a space) always has a single number followed by two letter.

This made the sending and receiving of the codes accurately somewhat challenging, and part of that challenge is that the SPACING of characters becomes of some importance. (Note that the spacing embedded within the codes when submitted as contest results was never taken into consideration, but receiving a space in the correct place encourages the receiving station to feel that he may or may not have copied the code down correctly)

You may have read elsewhere that the SPACING of CW is one of my pet hobby-horses, as one of the main quality defects of a great many CW operators in my opinion is that their spacing is abysmal, assuming there is any spacing at all.

Perfectly formed characters can be rendered fairly unintelligible (especially when reading the code in one's head) by poor or non-existent spacing.   Conversely, less-than-perfectly-formed characters when spaced correctly should cause the experienced CW operator no difficulty in decoding.

So now we have a CW contest (at least one of the two segments of this contest is for CW operators) where the desirability of good spacing has been eliminated by replacing "quirky" alphanumeric postcodes with monotonously regular Maidenhead locators in their strict format of letterletternumbernumberletterletter (forgive my spacing ... !)

The Changing Face of RoPoCo - I'm hopping mad now!

After a long hard week working away from home, I returned this evening to find the latest RadCom magazine waiting.   It is somewhat more pleasant reading than the contents of a brown envelope from HM Revenue and Customs also awaiting me, but upon skimming through the Sport Radio section the word RoPoCo leaped of the page and grabbed my attention.

You may recall from an earlier post that I wasn't too impressed with the change of format of my own favourite contest, I'm even less impressed at a little piece of logic which goes, and I quote : "... participation in RoPoCo1 has generally been in the 50s, and RoPoCo2 in the 40s ...".    They have made the main format change to RoPoCo1!   Go figure ...

Well  "hopping mad" might be just a bit of an overstatement, but I'm certainly puzzled!

ROPOCO SSB - a selfish rant

I will be the first to admit that this is a very selfish point of view, but I really am quite annoyed (well as annoyed as I will allow myself to be over something which is a hobby/leisure activity) that the "powers that be" whoever they are, have turned one of the twice-yearly ROPOCO contests from a CW challenge to an SSB or phone one.

Especially ROPOCO1 (April) in which I have previously participated many times.

I am not a contester at all, but I really enjoy this particular challenge as it is, quite frankly, just that, a challenge.

What it challenges, from my own selfish point of view is one's CW sending and receiving ability/technique.

It does this in quite a different way to that of most if not all other contests in that _ACCURACY_ is prized above all else.

Most other contest have so many elements which are predictable (report, serial number, region, and so on) that "quantity" rather than "quality" carries enormous weight, whereas in ROPOCO accuracy is king.

Sending technique and accuracy is challenged. In other forms of amateur CW communications the odd sending error is normally of little consequence - the operator who knows he has made a mistake in transmission has to decide whether or not to correct that mistake, and if he decides to correct it, he has numerous methods open to him how to achieve that. In CW conversation, he will often just let the mistake go and rely on the operator at the other end picking up the error and dealing with it in his own way.

With ROPOCO this concept just doesn't work, and the challenge is for both the operator sending, and the operator receiving knowing how to deal with what they think might be a mistake in either transmission or reception. Mistakes lose points!

If you have never participated in ROPOCO this notion might be somewhat lost on you, but those of you who have will know exactly what I mean.

It could be argued, and I am sure that it will be, that this format should translate perfectly well to a "phone" format, and I am sure it will, but my point is that the corresponding challenge in speech communications is quite different to that in telegraphy.

For my money, I "they" wanted to try out ROPOCO in speech form, they should have had an _extra_ contest for the speech boys and left us brass pounders with our twice-yearly bout of fun.

The reason why I am so narked that the April test has been changed is simply because that is the one I usally participate in!

How selfish is that?!