CW Skimming is very effective right now; I can almost always get a higher rate
in the first half of a CW test, if I click and work spots rather than CQ'ing.
Only after that slows down do I switch to CQ'ing with a little bit of venturing
off to work new spots during slow times. It has taken me several years of use
to get to the level of discipline where I used CW skimming very fruitfully in
WAE CW 2013.
RTTY skimming has advanced a lot in the past year, I have used telnet clusters
that show DL4RCK skimmer spots in several tests (and also not used it in other
tests.) There are only a handful (two? three?) DL4RCK skimmers active out there.
I do not feel that RTTY Skimming has yet advanced to that point where it helps
my raw rate in the same way as CW skimming. There aren't that many skimmers and
their coverage does not feel nearly as complete as CW skimmer's.
With any of the skimming, using it with discipline is the only way you will end
up improving your total number of Q's. Discipline for both CW and RTTY, means
for me, knowing to mark for later if the QSO is in a bad phase, and coming back
later when it is in a good phase. I can kinda set my own little mental timer to
come back when the Q should be wrapping up.
I always wanted to use my own multichannel decoder to help pick the next Q in a
good phase in a RTTY test, but my own attempts at home multichannel decoding
have not been very useful. Previous attempts at my own multichannel decoding
usually last about 5 minutes into the contest when I decide it's stupid to try
to keep the bandwidth so wide with such a variation in dynamic ranges out there.
Tim N3QE
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