[CQ-Contest] Young people.

[Sylvan Katz]

Martin and fellow contesters:

Martin's insightful remarks should make all of us stop and think about
the sport of amateur radio contesting in more depth! It is obvious he
has the experience to make comments and he seems to have taken the time
to draw some considered conclusions.

I support his general notion that many contests are 'brute force'
contests but we must remember that they evolved through a time when the
technology was not as advanced as it is today. In their time they were
considered to be 'skill' contests. Unfortunately as we grow older some
of us like to hang onto the 'good old times' and we do not usually want
to evolve with the times as rapidly as we should  (I am 56 and I too
started contesting in my youth). However, I am a change merchant and I,
like you, wish our contest committees would be bold enough to make
change - in some instances radical change.

He says in his posting that "Skills are in our own nature, and can be
improved by practicing hard." In essence I agree but there is at least
one factor other than a high ERP that is  known to impact contest scores
and that is geographical location. I grew up in VE5 land. I am familiar
with the 'auroral black hole' - during high auroral activity sometime no
HF gets in or out of here. According to Murphy or Sod's law, depending
in where you live,  these distrubances frequently occur during the big
DX contests. On the other hand I lived in southern England for 10 years.
Even though I was at the same northern latitude as I was in VE5 land I
never experienced a single auroral blackout. Furthermore, G and other EU
stations can can work the East Coast of the US stations on 40m using
nothing more than a wet noodle for an antenna - well okay that is an
exaggeration - how about a short piece of wire. In VE5 landit can be a
taxing proposition to work EU consistently on 40m with out spending a
lot of money for an antenna system (an the realestate to put it on). So
I would suggest that skill, location and erp are major factors in
achieving a high rank in most of the well known DX contests.

In essence I agree it takes 'little or no skill' to sit on one freq and
send 59905 for 48 hours --- unless of course you are in command of a
continuously large pile up! It takes more skill to exchange an
intelligent message like those sent in the WAE and SS. And it takes even
more skill to send an intelligent message and QSY after each contact. At
least it would be nice if the contest committees would have the sense to
change the senseless 59905-type of exchange to more complex and exciting
exchange. It would even be nice if they perhaps introduced a 60 min QSY
rule (I think the Sprint QSY rule is too short for those of us that like
to work pile-ups in DX contests). But what I would really like to see
the contest world use its imagination and knowledge about
state-of-the-art communication technology to evolve a DX contest that
strives to provide a level playing field. Wouldn't be nice to see a few
skilled single ops running a 100w and a dipole at the top of the ranks
after their efforts had been equalized in some way to the high erp
mega-stations.

Since there are so few, if any, weekends available in the contest
calendar may be the simplest solution to evolving the 'sport' of amateur
radio contesting might be to encourage others to setup some alternative
systems that use different scoring rules and categories. Participants in
the major contests, like the CQ WW, participants could submit their
logs/scores to these groups as well as to the normal committees. These
new groups could apply their new and novel scoring systems, may be
introduce some new categories and perhaps apply intriguing scoring
systems like the one suggested by Guy Olinger were bonus points are
awarded for QSOs that are confirmed by the checking software. By
introducing other scoring systems each of us could see how we are doing
using the traditional methods and at the same time see how our
performance looks when analyzed in a different light. Perhaps this
approach might illuminate the path to some more radical contest changes.

Just some random thoughts .......

73 .... syl
--
Sylvan Katz
Saskatoon, Sask
VE5ZX & G0TZX



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