[CQ-Contest] K5GO speaks out for youth in contesting

[Eric Gruff]

I agree with Tor - I don't know that "young people aren't interested in
contesting", but rather that new hams in general probably are intimidated by
a "contest" when they are unfamiliar with so many aspects of the hobby. Then
there's the CW aspect - how many newer hams (licensed five years or less, to
pick an arbitrary number) are CW proficient at 20 wpm or higher? Couple that
with the time it takes to acquire a "contest-worthy" station. I'm not being
a snob here, but thinking of other hobbies/pasttimes (golf, tennis, road or
mountain biking, etc.), how many newbies jump right into tournaments or
races?

My suggestion is to find hams who are interested in expanding their use of
the hobby, and then exposing them to contesting as part of a multi-op setup
(for example) or just having them sit next to a contesting op and help with
logging, etc. It's a lot less intimidating than just figuring it out by
themselves, and I would bet at least 10 or 20 percent would find the
experience exciting enough to get more involved. If we wait until new hams
discover contesting for themselves, it may indeed be too late.

One last suggestion - how about a short sprint-type contest-in-a-contest as
a fun addendum to Field Day? Kind of like GOTA for getting new hams on
board, but instead it would be for already-licensed hams to try contesting
in a turnkey setup with Elmers right there to help out. It could also add
participation points to stations who work the contesters, thus increasing
the FD score.

Just my $0.02.

Eric NC6K

-----Original Message-----

Message: 6
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 17:50:33 +0000 (UTC)
From: RT Clay <rt_clay at bellsouth.net>
To: "cq-contest at contesting.com" <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] K5GO speaks out for youth in contesting
Message-ID:
	<1072648722.4922081.1458841833529.JavaMail.yahoo at mail.yahoo.com>
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This comes up a lot- people keep saying that the reason young people are not
interested in ham radio is because of smart phones, the internet, online
computer games, etc. The idea being that today's instant communication makes
ham radio seem boring.

The problem with this as the cause, however, is that in the 1980's (when I
was first licensed as a "young person"), none of those were around and the
number of young people in ham radio and especially contesting was also very
small :)

TorN4OGW
 

    On Thursday, March 24, 2016 9:32 AM, David Gilbert
<xdavid at cis-broadband.com> wrote: