Note the shifty, or perhaps thoughtful, eyes of Burt.

He drones on about the sad state of affairs of various aspects of ham radio.

In his defense, he is actually correct about many things he says.

We are too fat and tend to hide our real selves behind the microphone or key.

I share in Burt’s several meaningful observations of particular concern to amateur radio operators.

Here are some highlights from the video with Ham Help Desk (HHD) comments in italics…

• “The is so-and-so-callsign… for ID” – Yes, Burt this is more words than necessary, but is just slang.
• Traffic Nets and Radio-grams are replaced by the Internet – Yeah, sure, and cheap long distance made state-to-state QSOs not so economically desirable too. I am not too hip to the radio-gram thing either, but don’t see the problem keeping a spare “network” in place. Better to have it and not need it.
• Contesters lowest form of ham – Yes I agree 59 all the time is silly, but contesting is the one thing that will continue to draw in young folks. That’s just the way it is.
• That “German Nazi thing” – Dude… Using a little slang there I see.
• Fat – Yes you are right on the money about this one. Amateur Radio like many leisure hobbies attract leisure loving folks.
• Field Day – Well we love Field Day and enjoy the hard work involved… Maybe some of us aren’t so fat after all.
• Exams are Easy – Yup, pretty easy… you are right.
• If you want to laugh don’t use HI HI – I agree with you Burt. That screams Geek.
• “Some say code is ancient. Is walking ancient?” – HI HI HI HI… oops I mean ha ha ha.
• PRB reasons for “public service” silly – You are probably right.
• Dead Full Quieting – Just slang Burt
• Those with the $ can be a Big Gun – In the thousands of years of human existence has this ever really changed?

Every language has slang and hams most certainly don’t skimp on this. I see your point Burt, but we can be a little relaxed can’t we.

In a separate video from Burt I totally agree with him about operators who try to “bust” in on a conversation you might be having with a foreign ham in a highly sought DXCC. I would forgive this, slightly, during a contest environment, but certainly think is simply rude to try to interrupt a cordial conversation between two individuals.

Anyway, Burt you seem to be a cool fellow. I’ll make you a deal… I will promote good ham health if you will allow us evil contesters to do our thing from time to time… along with Field Day…

Here is Burt…

This year we extensively used the “operator initials” field in the N3FJP Field Day Network 2.8 logging software package. Operators used their call-sign as their ‘initials’ while honored guests used their actual initials.

The site-wide log offered many great analysis possibilities. One particularly interesting metric we tracked this year was QSO rates. We generated graphs of QSO totals vs. Time Between QSOs. Here is an example of the entire log…

QSO Rates of Entire Club Field Day Log

We are able to further parse the QSO data by operator, mode, band and any other parameter recorded by the very nice N3FJP Field Day Network logging software.

This year was especially cool because many operators who are not regular contesters made an effort to come by and operate. This is fantastic. We had high hopes to make our 4A Field Day operation inviting to all our members young and old. Indeed young and old came out and had a great time.

What I noticed about some of the older operators was their desire to use pen and paper to record call-signs and exchange information of a QSO and then move to the computer keyboard to record the QSO. This frequently resulted in several dupes since these folks were not capitalizing on the logging computer’s instant dupe checking.

There are many reasons to not use pen and paper, but I wondered if the overall efficiency might be one of them. Since I know which operators used paper and since the wonderful N3FJP software records each operator’s identity all I did was add a field to the database and marked the QSOs initially recorded on paper.

Here is the graph of the very same Field Day results of the operators who logged straight to computer…

QSO Rates of Computer Loggers

…and here is the graph showing the performance of the paper users…

QSO Rates of Paper Loggers

It seems at least a little clear that jotting down QSO information on paper in a contesting environment places an obvious obstacle to operator efficiency. If you look at the graphs above it is clear that most of the QSOs made were not only made more efficiently, but in far greater numbers by the operators skipping the use of paper.

Many good Ham Radio Contest Logging software packages exist to help the Amateur Radio operator record those all important QSOs. Good titles to consider include N3FJP, DX4Win, Ham Radio Deluxe, N1MM. Prolog2k, Winlog32 and WriteLog. Instant Dupe Checking alone should make you want to remove paper form your logging flow.

There are many reasons why data is different between groups of attributes like paper and non-paper QSO loggers. Is it jumping to conclusions? You be the judge.