[CQ-Contest] Encouraging contest participation

[Ron Notarius W3WN]

I've been giving this some thought.

There has been a demand, on and off for quite some time from some, for the
ARRL to automatically give awards credit based on submitted contest logs
that match up.

And it wouldn't be hard to do.

But two things keep surfacing:

Second, there are many amateurs for many reasons who have declined to
participate in Logbook of the World.  Many of these are active or
semi-active contesters as well.  Why are we trying to force them (or more
correctly, their contest logs) into a system that they have declined to
participate in?

But more importantly, First:  What's the big deal?

OK, so you've emailed the contest sponsor your Cabrillo log.  IF you have
chosen to participate in Logbook of the World... you do a quick encryption
(takes all of what, 20 seconds?) and then email your encrypted Cabrillo log
to the LotW server.  Total time:  A minute?

Are we that jaded that we can't be bothered to submit two emails instead of
one?  To save a minute or so?  Heck, we probably spend more time (as a
group) griping about it, than it would actually take to do!

Or does that make too much sense?

73

-----Original Message-----
From: cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com
[mailto:cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Pete Smith
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:17 AM
To: CQ-Contest at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Encouraging contest participation

Dave's right about the potential value of encouraging more casual 
participants.  Just as happened to me 54 years ago, participation for 
purposes other than winning a certificate will result in some 
percentage catching the bug and becoming competitors.

One thing that would be a big boost to participation by 
non-contesters would be to give award credit for contest QSOs that 
have been verified (cross-checked) by the log checkers.  Surely, it 
would be a fairly trivial addition to the log-checking software to 
have it generate a separate list of the verified QSOs in some pretty 
universal format, which the awards folks could use to grant credit 
toward DXCC, WAS, WPX, WAZ or whatever.  Talk about quick, low-cost 
gratification, obtainable nowhere else but through participation in
contests!

I can hear the screams now about diluting the "integrity" of the 
awards, but cheating scenarios involving collusion among participants 
in a contest to fabricate QSOs are pretty far fetched, and should be 
pretty easy to detect.  I suppose people might also point to the loss 
of revenue by ARRL, particularly for DXCC, but I truly wonder if the 
awards program is a profit center for them, or more a question of 
loss mitigation.

73, Pete N4ZR 

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