[CQ-Contest] Encouraging contest participation

[David Gilbert]

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



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    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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