[CQ-Contest] Observations of a young ham

[W0MU Mike Fatchett]

I had the opportunity to talk to my son in more detail and ask him why 
contesting does not interest him.  Here is what we discussed.

1.  Cost to get in the game and have a chance to win is prohibitive.  
You need a great station, land, etc to really win or compete.  The 
playing field is so unbalanced that it becomes a show stopper.  For him 
he has no costs when at home.  I consider my station modest with a 70 ft 
tower and land to put up Inv L's and full sized 80m verticals and some 
receiving antennas.  I could do more but we have horses and they need to 
roam and are hell on things in the pasture.

2. You have to invest a lot of time to get good.  If he can not have a 
really good station then why invest the time to get good if you are not 
going to be able to really compete.

2. The tools we use to contest, logging software, packet look like old 
dos programs.  He called them ugly and boring.  He is used to amazing 
graphics in games.  I found this observation interesting.  I feel that 
the tools we have are pretty good and give me what I want to see readily 
available.  I was not expecting this answer.

3. He is far more interested in using packet where he can immediately 
chase things.  Packet essentially gives him a list of things to do or 
goals.  It is more visual so more interesting.  He thought that more 
automated systems would be interesting.  Young people and even us older 
folk expect things to happen much faster.  They are the generation of 
instant satisfaction and some of that even rubs off on us older folk.

4.  Talking to someone over the airwaves is still pretty cool. You can 
instantly talk around the world if the right condx exist, but we can 
talk all over the world with our phones so it is not as amazing as it 
once was.

5. CW is interesting but he was surprised that we don't have better code 
readers.  While he would like to learn the code time is once again the 
factor.  They have so many other outlets for entertainment that it is 
hard to find time for all of them.

6.  Results take far too long to come out

7.  He proposed that all participants use a scoreboard type system.  
Many of us have said this was something we need to do but have instead 
met with amazing resistance and a ton of excuses why people refuse to 
use it.  A system where everyone can check it out and see what is going 
in in the contest.  We are back to visuals.

6. Playing radio in the car driving is fun because there is not much 
else to do but drive.

7. He has his general license but he does not have the technical skills 
or electronic knowledge to build a shack or decent station.  I am not a 
great teacher especially to my own kids so I take some of the blame for 
this but it is hard to teach people things when they don't want to 
devote much time to it.  I feel a reluctance to even try to do something 
without having the proper knowledge.  A far cry from when I was young 
and tried all sorts of silly antennas and projects that mostly failed 
miserably but boy did I learn from those mistakes.

That pretty much summed up our hour long conversation and I am no closer 
to figuring out how to sell ham radio and contesting to them.  I hope 
some will find this information helpful and interesting.

W0MU