SBMS is all about microwave experimenting. The SBMS contest is a nation-wide event that starts on 2.3 GHz and goes up from there. The prime "money" bands are 2.3, 3.4, 5.7 and 10 GHz. At 24 GHz and up, it gets pretty experimental. Microwave-oriented clubs in other areas often compete in the SBMS contest. The club competition has often been won by the Northern Lights Radio Society in Minnesota.

Several SCCC members, including AF6O, N6HC, N6MU and N6NB, happened to start talking about the SBMS contest over lunch a couple of weeks ago. A plan was hatched to do a coordinated operation in the SBMS event. I (N6NB) had three fixed stations available that coverthe bands above 2.3 GHZ plus more microwave-capable rovers than we could ever staff with operators. W6IT agreed to operate the mainstation at my Panorama Heights house, as he did in last year's SBMS contest. N6HC, who lives all of a mile away as the crow flies, offered to activate a second station at Panorama Heights, this one built around a minivan and tower trailer in the driveway. Arnie's friend N1BKB agreed to get on at my house three miles away, using a microwave setup atop a 70-foot tower. Meanwhile, AF6O operated a rover-like setup in my E350 Ford van and I roved in my Ford F150.

With that group of operators, we had a critical mass for a successful effort. The contest is scored by distance with no geographic multipliers, so rovers have an incentive to stay far away from each other. I roved all over the Antelope Valley, stopping every 10 miles to work the fixed stations and AF6O, who parked the van at his home in Pinon Hills and worked me over distances of 50 to 100 miles. The rules allow rovers to re-work everyone (rover or fixed) after every 10-mile move, so things can happen really fast.

The results will be posted online shortly after the log submission deadline in early June. It's too soon to know how we did, but SCCC is likely to be one of the top-scoring clubs after an interestng weekend of microwave DXing.

Wayne Overbeck, N6NB less

I attended the Super Conference and did a talk about setting world DX records on 2.3 and 3.4 GHz last year. I also had a paper in the published Conference Proceedings book. Jim Forsyth asked me to write something about the event for the SCCC website.

The conference had many highlights, One was a talk by Dr. Joe Taylor, K1JT, about the newest features of his WSJT weak-signal digital software. Those attending the final banquet were asked to vote for the best talk at the conference. Joe won "by a very wide margin," according to emcee and co-host Phil Theis, K3TUF, president of the Mt. Airy Packrats. There were also many other excellent technical talks.

Dave Sumner, K1ZZ, the recently retired CEO of ARRL, was the keynote speaker, giving his first speech as a FORMER League official. Dave talked about the threats to amateur radio spectrum allocations, some of which are frighteningly real--especially in the microwave and millimeter wave region.

The topic that dominated conversations in the hallways and hospitality suites was the August UHF Contest and ARRL's proposed new UHF and Up Contest. ARRL recently announced that it was cancelling the August contest now to clear the way for a new contest in early May, starting next year. When ARRL made the surprise announcement of the cancellation last month, many VHF enthusiasts from coast to coast objected. Many said it was their favorite contest. A coast-to-coast group came together to take over sponsorship of the August UHF Contest.

The 39th annual August UHF Contest will be held as originally scheduled on Aug. 6-7, 2016, with the Mt. Airy Packrats, the Northern Lights Radio Society (Minnesota) and the Pacific Northwest VHF Society acting as co-sponsors, joined by many other co-sponsors (including me). The contest has its own website, www.uhfcontest.org

What most troubled many supporters of the UHF contest was the secrecy of ARRL's decision to drop the contest. The decision was apparently made at the January board meeting, but it was not mentioned in the board minutes. The author of the QST article about the 2015 UHF Contest was kept in the dark, as were the VHF editor of QST and several other contest article authors. The 2015 results article in QST urged readers to take part in the 2016 event. That was published long after the cancellation decision was made.

To his credit, Kermit Carlson, W9XA, chairman of the board-level sub-committee that cancelled the UHF Contest and drafted proposed rules for a new one, made a public announcement of the proposed rules just before the Super Conference--and then appeared in person to talk about them. When members of his audience objected to the secrecy or some of the proposed rules for the new contest, he repeatedly said, "I am the public face" of this process. He never passed the buck even when it became obvious that many in the audience were not pleased.

One of the major features of ARRL's proposed new May UHF Contest is distance scoring, with a very heavy emphasis on the microwave bands. A contact on 222 or 432 MHz is to count for one point per mile, while Qs on 902 and 1296 will count for four points per mile and Qs on 2.3, 3.4, 5.7 and 10 GHz will count for TWENTY points per mile. EME contacts will not count at all.

The heavy emphasis on the microwave bands reverses a long-standing ARRL practice of de-emphasizing the higher bands by creating categories that exclude them. Many stations that have microwave capability have abandoned those bands to get into "limited" categories. That led to a drastic decline in activity on the bands that are most threatened by non-amateur interests. ARRL now proposes to reverse course and create strong incentives for use of the microwave bands.

The distance-scoring concept itself has also been questioned by some because of its geographic biases. Enhanced long-haul tropo is common in the midwest and especially the east but almost unheard of in the west except on over-water paths such as California to Hawaii.

I was the sixth call area representative on an ARRL committee that considered distance scoring more than 30 years ago and rejected it in favor of using grid squares as multipliers (previously, ARRL sections had been the multipliers in VHF contests), Distance scoring was also tried in the VHF sprints but abandoned after several years because participation declined sharply after the first year. Now W9XA's committee seems to hope distance-scoring will "revitalize" VHF-UHF contests. The committee surely recognizes there are very unequal scoring opportunities in various regions. Their answer is to have NO national awards at all, apparently not even top-10 listings in QST. Instead, the proposal is to give awards only in 18 newly created geographic entities, not nationally. There could be as many as 72 regional winners (in single op, multiop, rover and team categories), but no overall winners. It isn't clear how the top scorers could be prevented from going through the results region by region and compiling their own lists of national "winners." That happened before when national top scores were not listed in QST.

All of this led to some spirited discussions at the Super Conference and afterward on the various VHF reflectors..

In my initial draft of this article, I ended it at this point. But there's some history that should be pointed out to SCCC members.

For the first 50 years of VHF contests, they were dominated by stations in the northeast. As a Californian, I managed to win the single op category in ten VHF/UHF contests in the 1970s--before the advent of grid squares. But that was unusual. Nobody else on the west coast was winning VHF contests then, and no western club had won a club gavel until SCCC started winning just a few years ago. SCCC's run began when we started recruiting talented operators and outfitting them with microwave-equipped rover stations. By working each other quickly in multiple grid squares (a strategy that critics called "pack roving"), SCCC has been able to win club gavels in 13 UHF or VHF contests by now. When that started happening, critics began demanding distance scoring as a "solution" to the "problem" we created. Even though our group was working considerable distances on the microwave bands, and despite the unpopularity of distance scoring in the sprints, there are still influential people who see distance scoring as a panacea.

There are at least two ironies in this. For one thing, our group has largely retired from competitive roving. The critics of "pack roving" are beating a dead horse. Moreover, experience has shown that "pack roving" is a successful strategy in distance-scored contests as well. W9XA's committee has given tacit recognition to that fact by including a "team" category in the proposed UHF rules. That category will encourage groups of rovers to get together with one or more fixed stations and cooperate to maximize their scores. The new "team" roving concept sounds a lot like "pack roving" under another name.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out when the rules are finalized and the new May UHF contest has been held a few times.

Wayne Overbeck, N6NB less