Very interesting points made by Mike. The League and its publication is
supposed to be reponsive to its membership. Clearly, the membership felt
that the utilization of 5 or 6 pages of numbers which did little to nothing
for them was of value, and the League agreed on the point. The decision was
probably made easier by the fact that not only are contesters quite savy
(i.e., able to look at scores on the web), but also able to discuss in depth
topics in an entire publication dedicated to contesting - NCJ.
Now, somebody has mentioned that the Contesters rate sheet has 10,000 or
14,000 subscribers. True, but bear in mind that this is not only a free
publication, but is probably one in which not a small number of league
members just clicked on the "yes, send to me tab" on basically every free
publication that the league offers.
Combining this data with the number of subscribers to NCJ and the number of
logs that we see in most contest, I would guess that the active contesting
population in the United States is in the range of 5,000 - 7,000 (inclusive
of VHFers, and HFers).
As a percentage of League members, that is probably about 3 percent.
Looking at this month's QST, there were about 89 pages of the publication
devoted to articles, correspondence, and the like. Of those 89 pages,
contesting got 8 of them.
In light of the readership feedback, the existence of NCJ, and membership
ranks comprised of contesters, having 9 percent of the magazine devoted to
contesting is probably reasonable.
Hope you all are having fun in Dayton!
73 Rich NN3W
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Keane K1MK" <k1mk@alum.mit.edu>
To: "W2RU - Bud Hippisley" <W2RU@frontiernet.net>
Cc: "Jim Reisert AD1C" <jjreisert@alum.mit.edu>; <cq-contest@contesting.com>
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] QST Contest Results
> All of this is very reminiscent of the discussions of this topic four
> years ago. Yes indeed, What A Long Strange Trip It's Been
>
> At 03:33 AM 5/19/06, N7MAL wrote:
>>What are the numbers Jim? The ARRL claims, on their website, 152,000
>>members. How many members on this list? How many members at contesting.com
>>?
>
> Don't know about CQ-Contest or contesting.com. However, the ARRL
> Contester's Rate Sheet had over 14,000 e-mail subscribers in March
> according to N0AX. On the other hand, NCJ has a paid circulation of a
> bit more than 2500 according to the most recent publishers statement.
>
> I think that says something about the number of contesters and their
> willingness to spend money.
>
> At 08:04 AM 5/19/06, Dale Putnam wrote:
>>This is very disturbiing, not only do they not publish what we
>>want... they have mislaid the idea that the customer comes first...
>
> For whatever reasons, contest results are a polarizing subject:
> people seem to either love them or hate them. And when the
> "customers" are surveyed about what they'd like to see being
> published, contest results always drew big negatives and low
> positives. (The latest of the QST reader surveys was summarized in
> Jun '04 QST and is included in
> <http://www.arrl.org/ads/ad-matters/Ad-Matters-Oct-2004.pdf>).
>
> It's hard to reconcile "The Customer Is Always Right" with the
> preferences expressed by the membership in objective surveys.
>
>
>
> Bud,
> Keep letting your division director know how you feel about this. It
> took a vote of the ARRL board of directors to relocate contest line
> scores from QST to the Web. The only way line scores would ever be
> brought requires similar action by the ARRL BoD; the staff in
> Newington can't do it on their own initiative.
>
> 73,
> Mike K1MK
>
> Michael Keane K1MK
> k1mk@alum.mit.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> CQ-Contest mailing list
> CQ-Contest@contesting.com
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