[CQ-Contest] Observations of a young ham

Mon Dec 19 11:53:24 EST 2016

This is an interesting topic.  I'll share my thoughts as someone who
entered the hobby at age 12 and who recently turned 40. I'm not young, but
I'm among the younger participants in a typical contest... to the point
where I get asked for fills during the AA.

I had access to video games since I got my first computer at age 7, but
they really didn't start to be all that much fun until Nintendo came out in
the 1980s.  When I got licensed in 1989 I'd already been through a few
addicting weeks playing Super Mario Brothers, but no past experience had
prepared me for the thrill of working DX.  Since I was the first ham in my
family my initial station was quite poor as I had not yet found any
elmers.  There's something quite magic to me about radio when you hear a
signal coming through from far away.

I have a brother who (in spite of much encouragement from me) never had any
interest in amateur radio. A cousin of mine eventually got licensed but has
had no interest in radiosport or CW.

Only last week I got the thrill of making my first MSK144 meteor scatter
QSO.  I have not done much with digital modes or VHF and this was quite a
thrill for me, watching the decoder spike for a brief instant before it
printed the message.  To many people, that QSO would have been no more
interesting than getting an IM on Skype from someone a few states away.
I'm not sure there is anything we can do to help those people appreciate
amateur radio.  Some people have very little concern for how things work or
what is actually happening to make some technology they use possible.

I continue to try new video game concepts now and then in case any turn out
to capture my imagination the way contesting has.  So far they are all very
artificial and I always think to myself that if I were imprisoned for a
long time with absolutely nothing to do I'd probably enjoy the thought of
trying to beat the algorithms, since with enough time it's inevitable that
you can win.   Multi-player games change this up a bit, but from what I
gather there are teenagers shouting all sorts of horrible slurs into their
microphones that makes the occasional "pig farmer" QRM on 75 meters seem
quite tame in comparison.

One area of gaming that I think does have potential is augmented reality,
especially once the technology allows those games to be fast-paced.  At
present most are slow, but Pokemon Go was very successful and people
apparently walked miles each day in search of the virtual creatures.

What I love most about amateur radio is that it's real.  The signal coming
through the headphones sounds the way it does because of the gear that is
right there in the shack, propagation, and the other station's gear.  When
a signal is hard to copy you can imagine that it might be a bit stronger if
the Yagi had one more director, if the receiver had more blocking dynamic
range, etc.  Each static crash may have been a lightning strike far away,
and the background noise is partially generated by nearby stars and
planets.  I'd analogize it to getting the chance to experience more
dimensions of reality than we typically get exposed to, while trying to
shape reality in such a way that we score well in the contest.  In the same
way that someone racing a sailboat must optimize the boat, sails, and
course amid wind, waves, and currents, we must deal with geomagnetic
storms, solar wind, and ionized atmospheric layers, not to mention old
fashioned ice and snow.

All this is why I find actual contesting much more fun than morse runner or
even remote ops.  It's just a bit more real to me and it's always full of
surprises. The sound coming through the speaker is not riding on trillions
of dollars worth of infrastructure, it's floating through the ether and
being processed by gear that I can touch and see and understand.  While
most of technology tries to insulate us from the realities of physics,
radiosport gives us knobs to turn and theory to put into practice.  It's
hard to imagine anything more fun than that!

73,
Matt NQ6N

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 9:54 AM, W0MU Mike Fatchett <w0mu at w0mu.com> wrote:

> There are so many more bad apples in gaming..........It comes with having
> so many more participants.  They can be banned out of the games much faster
> than the way the FCC or other foreign gov'ts deal with our bad apples and
> there are ignore features and they take personal harassment very seriously
> in gaming.
>
> Interest in ham radio is one thing, interest in contesting or radio sport
> is another.  Online gaming has managed to grab this age group and older and
> suck them in, thus the comparison. What are they doing right and can we
> feed off of that?  I hope our contest software visual programmers are
> thinking about this.  Is there a way to build two or three different user
> interfaces easily?  One for us old farts, and one or two for those wishing
> for a better visual presentation?
>
> I have two sons and a daughter, one son got his license and the other two
> have no interest.  I had towers and a pretty decent set up.  It made no
> difference.  They already had PlayStation, XBox and hand held games.  I
> think we appreciate the behind the scenes stuff much more as we get older
> and have the knowledge to grasp how extensive the other things are that go
> on to make it happen. I don't live on the East coast where I can work rare
> DX 24x7  on all bands 24 hours a day HI!
>
> W0MU
>
>
>
>
>
> On 12/19/2016 4:31 AM, Ed Sawyer wrote:
>
>> Today's young generation gets it "spoon fed, with great graphics, and
>> instantly".  There's an app for that you know..
>>
>>
>> In my opinion, the only way a young person is going to become interested
>> in
>> contesting is to get them VERY early and to have them outside on towers
>> and
>> with big antennas.  That's the one element that is not a handheld or VR
>> gaming equivalent.  If their world is on a screen and we present our
>> boring
>> screens, its over.  Its what is behind the screens that is cool.  If that
>> doesn't capture, its over.
>>
>>
>> The excuse that bad on the air behavior is somehow a problem is bogus.
>> Just
>> check out the garbage on line that the kids are used to and ignore ad it
>> doesn't dissuade them from being on line.
>>
>>
>> Contest DXpeditions, antenna farms, the science of propagation and space
>> weather, then adding the competitive part is the uniqueness of our hobby.
>> Trying to compare it to gaming is an effort in futility and doesn't
>> respect
>> what we actually do.
>>
>>
>> The next time you are out in the snow is sub zero weather fixing your 160
>> antenna before a contest, you might want to remind yourself of that.
>>
>>
>> 73
>>
>>
>> Ed  N1UR
>>
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