[CQ-Contest] WRTC 2018 - Area Activity

[Jeff Clarke]

If you have a small station you really don't have much a chance to qualify unless you have a friend who has a large station and allows you to operate. Another possibility is your friend qualifies and picks you as their teammate. Also, if you live in an area without a lot of active contesters that improves your chances. That's just how it goes in contesting.

In 2006 I was lucky to go and operate in WRTC from Brazil. The only reason K4BAI and I were picked is everything fell in place (maybe the stars aligned in our favor?) because people ahead of us had to drop out. I can still remember the day John called me to tell me he qualified , despite being 8th in the standings in our area, and asked me be to be his partner. BTW our area included the east coast, by far the hardest region to win in the US. The whole WRTC experience is still the highlight of my life as a ham. We placed pretty well in the final standings too.

Despite having the odds stacked against you it's still possible for a miracle to happen like it did for John and I but it's rare.

It's really too late to change the rules for Germany so it's not really productive to complain. Moving forward I would like to see the sponsor have more competitors.

This could be accomplished by having the competitor bring his own station. Many a DXpedition has proved that something as simple as a K3-KPA500-vertical or wires station ( or something similar) can produce an effective signal. This would save the sponsor a ton of money to not buy towers, antennas etc like they do now. They would need to just secure the operating sites. The FD approach has worked very well in the last couple events.

Keep the qualifying in place and pay for the area winner expenses the way it's done now. If you don't make it into that group allow a bunch of wildcard teams, where that team pays a small entry fee to compete and pay their own expenses. I think this would be a win-win situation.

I don't have much of a chance to win my area for WRTC 2018 since the competition is pretty heated this time ,so I'm not trying real hard this time. I'm still hope I can make it to Germany in 2018 as a spectator, which is almost a good as being a competitor.

Jeff