Everyone who is contributing to this discussion on roving should read
W9GKA's excellent monograph on the impacts of various changes on VHF
contesting over the years:
< http://www.w9smc.com/SMC%20VHF/OtherImpactsarticle.pdf >
There is a lot there relevant to this discussion, including a thorough
statistical analysis of various impacts on contest participation.
Important things to take away from that monograph that are relevant to
our discussion on roving include:
1. Changes to contest rules, scoring, and contest categories have
little impact on contest activity.
2. Creating new categories doesn't generate any more contest activity.
Participants just move from one category to another. This has proven
to be true for the limited multi op category, which just transferred
participants from the multi op category to the limited multi op
category. It appears that this has happened with the additional rover
categories as well. There were 96 entries in the 3 different roving
categories for the 2008 June contest, while there were 98 in the
single rover category in the 2007 contest.
3. Extrinsic events have a bigger impact on contest participation than
do changes in contest structure itself.
4. The rover category was born in controversy, in part to deal with
issues that are similar what is being discussed here; some contestants
in the QRP Portable category thought that others in that category were
abusing the rules by operating from several different grids in a
contest and often the same station appeared several times in the top
10 and occasionally won the portable category in multiple sections.
The implementation of a rover category was also to reduce the impact
of captive roving, controversial then as now.
5. One thing that correlates well to activity is club entries. This
may be one place for the VUAC to look for increasing activity in VHF
contesting.
6. In the beginning of VHF contests, and for the first years, there
were no categories. Multi ops competed with single ops and mobiles
were thrown in there as well. After a few years, multi op stations had
the individual ops listed, but they competed with the single ops. All
participants were listed together.
W9GKA is on the list, I hope that he will correct me if I have
misrepresented and misinterpreted the contents of his paper. Every
time I reread that paper I learn something new.
I have several more thoughts on the roving topic, which I will put in
separate e-mails. - Duffey
--
KK6MC
James Duffey
Cedar Crest NM
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