On 6/28/2011 8:28 AM, Joe wrote:

On 6/27/2011 11:17 PM, Gary "Joe" Mayfield wrote:

...

Is it fair he gets to make more contacts with his bigger better station? I think I would argue it is. It is his reward for all of that effort. Did he make it possible for stations that may not have otherwise made a contact 80 to make a contact? Yes, he did. He was monopolizing the frequency, but it seemed to make for a lot of contacts....

Joe kk0sd

All good and true, BUT.... did he monopolize the whole 80 meter band so no one else could use it? NO. There is a BIG difference there.

Yes there is! When working 80 meter phone, its not the only resource of its kind that is available at the moment. Imagine if field day was only operated on 4, 60 meter channels, and that's all we had. The people calling CQ and hogging those channels would get thousands of contacts each, while each person they contacted only got 1 contact. It's those ratios that are important to understand.

SAT operations are like only having 1 channel to operate on for all of field day. Phone, CW and digital operations on field day on the 5 most used bands provide 1000's of channels to use so that everyone gets a chance to find a place to call CQ for a while and stack up their own list of contacts.

In the two phone sessions I carried out on 10 and 15 meters, I worked more than 40 of the US states (some have multiple areas) and 3 BC districts in 3-4 hours of operation.

That was enough for me. I didn't need to do that for 24 hours straight, and I would not have gotten many more contacts after that. I proved that most of the US was reachable from Oklahoma. With a little more attention to propagation, I probably could of caught Hawaii and Alaska on the grey-line.

You can't do that on a LEO satellite regularly, let alone field day. If you want points bonuses, it's much more productive to work PSK or computer CW than try to "win" anything on points from SAT work on field day.

So, anyone trying to say that an Oscar station hogging a SAT on field day was a benefit to anyone, at all, is just completely missing the bigger picture from my perspective.

Gregg Wonderly W5GGW