[CQ-Contest] Observations of a young ham

[Rich K2WR]

This thread started out with a salutory goal, but now, like many, it’s gotten repetitive.  A lot of useful points were made early on, but what is most clear to me now is that we don’t know the answer.

I reject the comparisons with video gaming... I just don’t see the parallel.  Maybe I can’t, at age 65, with no interest in video gaming.

A lot has been said about the (software) tools we use to help our core activity.  I’ve been logging with computer assistance for at least 27 years, and each time I can’t resist thinking briefly about how much more enjoyable this all is without paper logs and dupe sheets.  It should be remembered that K1EA originally wrote CT for the primary purpose of doing away with visually checking for dupes.  Anyone starting to contest now, or during the past 20 years or so, would have no way of making this comparison.

Anyway, the look and feel of CT-DOS was fine with me.  CT for Windows was an admirable effort to put a Windows overlay on top of CT, but the results were too hardware-dependent, and by then N1MM was hard at work starting from scratch and re-writing the whole thing as a native Windows program, with countless more features and flexibility.  I liked the look and feel of Classic N1MM, and N1MM+ even better.  The durability of the original idea has been truly remarkable.

Having said all that, I don’t go and start operating a contest for the opportunity to use N1MM+ (although I must admit to enjoying the combination of computer-based sending and copying CW by ear).  It’s still a tool, and listening to the stations, weak and strong, perfect and imperfect, somehow get where they’re going through the ether remains the main attraction.  I make this point because as long as we debate the visual attraction of a tool, we’re missing the goal of the discussion.  There is something (or many somethings) that is failing to attract the younger generation(s) that nobody has quite identified yet.