An easy solution to this is to have ARRL Field Day not count satellite QSOs (on the FM birds or otherwise) for QSO points. Has anyone from AMSAT approached the ARRL Field Day committee about this?
Another easy solution is to move AMSAT Field Day to another day. Then there will be much less competition for the limited FM satellite resources and both Field Days would benefit.
73, Ryan AI6DO
On Monday, June 25, 2018, 4:55:23 PM PDT, tjschuessler@verizon.net tjschuessler@verizon.net wrote:
Yes the rules do definitely state the 1 contact rule for FM satellites. What you do here are operators who still try to rack up multiple contacts on the FM sats during FD and that only adds to the overload problem. My point was that since it is a "Honor system" type of thing. Someone running 150 watts into a decent beam can easily make multiple QSOs on an FM FD pass and all his QSOs still count for point (1 point only, but points just the same) and in ARRL FD rules, there is no way to disincentivize those operators from doing that. Now since the AMSAT rules do ask you to list contacts by satellite, it is easy to see if someone is running more than one contact on an FM bird. We won't see that reflected in ARRL rules so no use getting to hyped up over the issue.
There really will never be a good solution to this. Just hope that more stations get on the linear birds during FD, and than everyone can have lots of fun with lower frustration levels and more completed contacts.