[CQ-Contest] Encouraging contest participation

[Tim EI8IC]

>    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

With the internet a major part of many people's lives, it makes sense
to integrate it with contesting if it can make contesting 'more  fun,
more challenging, and generate more participation among the majority'.
One way of doing this is to let people see what is happening in real
time. The real-time logs are a good start, but the participation so
far is not very high. As you would probably expect from the designer
of the 'LogView' log mapping application, I would suggest that by
mapping contests in different ways, and presenting the maps on the
web, this would make contesting more interesting in many ways. Maps
could be real time, and could be 'filtered' in many different ways,
showing people currently on air, by band, links current, etc etc. Maps
can also be used for post-contesting processing and comparison. Maps
could show current DX spots, skimmer results, etc etc. Maps could
compare contest entries against local ham populations. The
possibilities are endless.

So why isn't this happening? The answer is simple - there is no
publicly available database showing the latitude and longitude of all
amateurs in the world. LogView only works for contacts in the USA and
Canada, where the positions of all amateur QTHs are publicly
available. Most of the rest of the world is not so lucky. The only
source of positional information - the Buckmaster CD - can only be
used by its purchasers, and can't be exported. I asked Buckmaster if a
minimum dataset (call, lat, lon) on a server might be possible - the
answer was NO.

So is there a simple solution to the lack of positional data that
could be used in a multitude of ways? Yes - if part of the contest
exchange was the operator's grid locator: 4 or 6 characters. It would
not be that difficult to do, and the grid locator system has been
accepted and understood by the majority of hams in the world. Anyone
with privacy concerns could send a 4 character locator, rather than
the standard 6 characters.

So what's stopping this happening?

73s, Tim EI8IC

http://www.mapability.com/ei8ic/
Contester Resources, Ham Map Heaven, and the home of the FREE LogView
contest mapper.