[CQ-Contest] Competitor friendly contesting

[DL8MBS]

Hello Kirk et al,
I feel a misunderstanding about "competitor friendly contesting". It 
should not be about more wallpapers or watering down. My point is the 
better adaptation of contesting to the real world situation of most 
hams. Of course power to all who can afford more than 40 hours and 
setting the standards. But you too know that it is not possible for most 
and it´s no sign of lesser skill and commitment to share parts of the 
weekend with a family and other obligations. The semi-professionals in 
our amateur sport will still take the big titles. But with shrinking ham 
population we should have more competetive offers fitting better in most 
everyday lifes. Why call this greater part of the ham and contesting 
population more or less whiners who are only eager to get plaques 
without commitment? And they should also do it in the big events - 
having the real challenge and perhaps helping for a bigger overall 
number of QSOs because of a more attractive contest.

There are even so many big guns regretting on 3830 too less available 
time ("family obligations", "business flights scheduled" and so on). 
Because of that reasons there would always be a lot of them in a (maybe 
informal) 24-hour half-marathon . So it won´t have whimpy results and 
cheap plaques. The best scorers will have to have all the stacks, skill 
and commitment you described. A quick copy&paste from 3830 final claimed 
scores with up to 30 hours of operation from 2004 CW-CQWW:

USA SOAB HP
K4ZW              1810   127   376    30  2,555,743
K1NQ              1310   120   380    28  1,775,500
W2XL              1226   119   352    28  1,615,530
N2CU              1125   118   344  23.8  1,445,136
K9OM              1091   121   352    18  1,417,581

Every ham who is crazy enough for contesting will try to be on as many 
hours as possible, so I don´t see the danger of shrinking participation 
with "half-marathons" - even now the majority of participants don´t go 
for more than 30 hours, not to mention more than 40. But the "biggie" 
will always be the ultimate goal even if only rarely possible.

Besides that time-based "categories" could also help for a better 
comparison of results. Now our result tables are like lists of a golf 
tournament with every player finishing an unknown number of something 
between 36 and 72 holes. Getting offered such a list in my real world 
job as journalist the brave press officer would have a hard job to 
explain that... It could be solved by adding the hours of operation to 
the score lines or something like different background colours for over 
40h, over 30h, over 20h. The logchecking software could do it with an 
even standard in no time.

Thanks for reading and best 73, Chris (DL8MBS)