I had made some comments directly to Randy in response to his request
for inputs that might make contesting more interesting or encourage more
participation. He suggested I repost them to the reflector, so here is
a slightly rehashed version. Blame him, not me ;)
73,
Dave AB7E
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think the key at this point is how to get more non-contesters (or
very casual contesters) involved in contesting. More participants
simply make it more fun for everyone.
1. Articles describing the favorable experiences of new contesters
might help. The place for these would be in QST or on eHam, not
NCJ, and they should probably be run about twice per year. The
articles should also highlight that you don't have to be a serious
entrant to have fun, since I'd bet that many folks have the
impression that there's little point in competing unless you go all
out.
2. I know this is a really old and pretty well flogged dead horse,
but if cross-checked contest logs were acceptable for major awards
(DXCC, WAS, USA-CA, etc) I bet the casual ops would come crawling
out of the woodwork. As it is now, LoTW membership is far from
100% among active contesters, is fairly clumsy, and is limited in
the awards it supports.
3. This just popped into my head, so if it sounds stupid don't be
surprised. I wonder if another type of team category might be
interesting and encourage some more casual ops to jump in. Teams
comprised of some predefined number of hams (three? five?) would be
allowed to pool their results on an hour-by-hour basis, with the
best score for any clock hour being used toward the team score ...
kind of like a scramble in golf. Each ham would still be allowed to
enter the appropriate individual category, of course. It would
probably require some software additions to the log checking process
to first score individual logs and then capture the best clock hour
from the designated logs, but I bet it would be kind of fun. I
haven't played golf in decades, but from what I remember scrambles
were very popular among casual players because they gave everyone a
chance to make a contribution. In the case of a ham radio contest,
it would allow a guy who could only participate for a couple of
hours to still make a contribution, and it would allow a team to
craft some interesting strategies ... like having a little pistol
station operate in the waning hours of the contest to score more
points than the big gun who had already milked everything dry. Just
a thought ...
4. I always thought that the Rookie categories had the right
intent, but the wrong execution. The great majority of potential
contesters are not new hams, they are new contesters. It might be
more effective to let hams claim Rookie status who had not entered
the contest within the last three years, or something like that.
73,
Dave AB7E
Randy Thompson K5ZD wrote:
> But, I would love to hear more ideas about how contesting could be made
> more
> fun, more challenging, and generate more participation among the majority.
>
> Randy, K5ZD
>
>
>
>
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