Hi all,
My feeling is that the changes in QST are not designed to cater to us.
Is that a bad thing? I do not believe it is, for several reasons. How many
of us after 20 years of SS or more still need to look at the same set of
rules? Moreover, how many of us on this reflector, having proven ourselves
duly capable of Internet navigation, can't go to the ARRL site for a
refresher should we need one?
Has QST dumbed down? I'd hardly consider a treatise on PIC programming
"dumbing down." Is QST attempting to bring new contesters into SS, DX, etc?
I sure as hell hope so.
Will the status quo of running just the rules do that? Not in a million
sunspot cycles. WE get the information we need from the running of rules,
but potential newbies skip right past. I think things like "Why you should
operate this contest?" are great. Bravo.
It's the same with the post-contest writeups. Page after page of grey will
not help sell contesting. Well-written contest reports with humour and
anecdotes play much better into the hands of people who could take or leave
contest reports. Those are the people QST needs to reach.
We can find what we need ourselves easily enough that we don't need QST to
hand it to us on a silver platter. That we can access that information via
an excellent Web-based database (thanks to N5KO and others) means we can get
more information than we could ever have dreamed possible in QST.
The way QST used to print results and announcements served us and largely us
alone. Well, we're coming back year after year anyway. We don't need a sales
job. We do, however, need to bring more people into contesting. I not only
accept the changes in QST, I celebrate them. Others should too.
QST is not, in my view, turning its back on contesters. QST is, however,
asking us to put our egos aside for the greater good. Are we big enough for
that?
73, kelly
ve4xt
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