To be weak, or not to be weak?

A couple of days ago, I was motivated to contact a fellow operator holding a UK Foundation licence, about his WSPR output.

Now, there are no rules, beyond the licence conditions, as to how much power you can put out through WSPR.  The rules, such as there are, are of the nature of a 'community norm' - what others are doing, and whether your idea about anything causes trouble for others.

So this person, who was sending 50W at 14MHz, was not breaking any legal rules. If he had sent 50W for a brief experimental period (I have seen up to 1kW reported for short experiments lasting an hour or so), then that would also be perfectly fine.

But this guy had decided to send 50W every couple of minutes, for days at a time.  I suspect that my concern wasn't so much that I received about 8 harmonic spots for him every time his rig keyed up.  Rather, it may have been concern that, as a Foundation licence holder, he may not appreciate the shortened life he could expect from his rig.

Typically for people these days, the response from the operator was terse and defensive: "Weak signal doesn't equate to low power.  But I have dialled it down a bit".

Well, he's in some sense right about the first part of his reply.  But it doesn't make any reasonable sense when just about everybody else is getting 200mW around the world quite comfortably, whilst he decides to use 50W and saturate the waterfall for countless others, hundreds of km and more away from him. 

Historically, 5W was the maximum output people using WSPR would tend to use.  Some still do use this, what is now a very high output.  But very few.  For those that do feel they need to use 5, or even 50W, then it is definitely the case that you should first look very seriously at your antenna arrangements that lead you to this conclusion.  It can only mean the situation is close to useless.

In any case, the Foundation man's continued response was, inevitably, to be defiant and carry on sending 50W every few minutes for a further day or so.  Either that, or he didn't change the output reporting setting in his software.  By yesterday, he had disappeared.  I hope he returns, but with a little more humility, learning, and community spirit.

Despite all this, I still managed to get to number 10 yesterday in the PE1ITR daily RX challenge, despite not being on WSPR for most of the daylight hours and, when I was on WSPR, TXing for 16% of the time!