[CQ-Contest] Observations of a young ham

[Kenneth E. Harker]

     Here is my perspective.  For background, I was first licensed at age 20 while attending college and I’m now 44.  In addition to HF and VHF contesting, I am active in IARU-style Amateur Radio Direction Finding, and have competed as a member of team USA at three ARDF World Championships.  Not all sports are head-to-head.  As others have mentioned, HF contesting (and ARDF) are both more in the style of races - albeit races in which you have to perform certain tasks between the start and the finish.  They allow you to take pride in beating your own personal times/scores, in going head-to-head against a particular rival/friend, or in winning an age/gender or transmitter/power category or the overall competition.  There are plenty of youth interested in track and field, orienteering, swimming, etc.  I’m not sure why we need to market/benchmark ourselves against e-sports all the time.

    Cost of entry can certainly be an inhibitor, even if many of us can think of ways to get around it.  We know that you can do well with more modest stations in the right contest for your location.  We know you can buy almost everything you need used, or even borrow more expensive components for a while.  We know that most super-station owners are not contesting 52 weekends a year and are often happy to host guest operators from time to time.  But I can easily see newcomers or would-be contesters might feel the cost of entry is daunting because they don’t know these things.  That said, many other sports have reasonably-high costs of entry, too - ever priced how much it would cost to get into ice hockey?  Or take up rally car driving?  

     But what I think the attraction to contesting really boils down to is whether or not you are interested in the science of radio.  If your primary interest is competition - there’s COD or CS or Halo for a fraction of the cost.  If you’re interested in collecting things - pokemon can fill that interest as well as QSL cards.  If you are interested in building things, well there’s all manner of other hobbies where you can assemble computers, drones, minecraft castles, competitive holiday light displays, etc.  What sets contesting apart, really, is learning about the science of radio - propagation, communications techniques, antenna patterns, figuring out how to understand foreign accents, etc.  If that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to you, then you’re probably not a great candidate for contesting and there are many alternatives out there for the non-radio enthusiast.  Contesting is a sport for people who love radio.

     On a related topic, maybe we should also be trying to understand why contesting is not more attractive to women.  The percentage of women getting science and technology degrees in universities (at least in the U.S.) has been increasing significantly in the past 10 years.  Women now account for 20% of all undergraduate engineering science degrees in the United States and 40% of all physics and mathematics degrees.  But for a technical hobby that would seem to draw heavily from people in those fields, contesting in particular does an abysmal job in attracting women.  At most ARDF events, I can expect 25% to 35% of the competitors to be women.  That’s an order of magnitude better representation than in contesting.  My guess is that more women in contesting would naturally attract more youth in contesting as well.

73 de WM5R

> On Dec 18, 2016, at 11:42 AM, W0MU Mike Fatchett <w0mu at w0mu.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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