[CQ-Contest] HELP WANTED: Makrothen RTTY Contest rule translations

[Stuart Phillips]

I apologize for the wide distribution of this request but am hoping we can solicit some help.

Together with the support of Pizza Lovers 259 (PL-259, a local contest club in the San Francisco Bay Area), I stepped in as contest manager for the Makrothen RTTY Contest in 2016 in an effort to prevent the contest from failing.

You can find information about the contest here - https://www.pl259.org/makrothen/ - Makrothen is one of the few contests to use distance scoring together with band multipliers for 40 and 80m reflecting the increased distance challenge on these bands.  Distance based scoring together with the choice of operating periods (you can enter them all!) are all part of working to even the playing field for geographic differences.

Makrothen also specifies different operating categories to split out SO2R operation (single or multi) into separate categories from single operator, single receiver SO1R operations.  There are both high and low power versions of these categories.

We scored the 2016 contest which had been run just before we stepped in – then promoted and scored the contest for the years since.  I’m happy to say that we’ve been able to rebuild participation with each new year with logs counts  2019 – 563, 2018 – 526, 2017 – 455 – this from 2016 – 224.

Not surprising given its roots, Europe still represents the largest regional participation, trailed by North American and then distantly, everything else!

As you can see from the table in the 2019 results article:

https://www.pl259.org/makrothen/results/results-article-2019/

participation from Asia has remained low and flat for many years, despite a significant PR effort we mounted prior to last year’s contest.

We are determined to do better and are starting by getting the rules for the 2020 running of the contest translated for non-English speaking OMs around the world.

We have Japanese in progress and are looking for help to translate the rules into:

Chinese – simplified
Chinese – traditional
Russian

We hope these translations, together with increased PR, will help drive increased activity in Asia.

If you are able to help translate into these languages, please send me a direct email.  We are looking for native speakers who are fluent in English and are well versed in Ham Radio terminology and its mapping to other languages.

Makrothen RTTY runs the second weekend in October so we’d like to get the translations done before the beginning of August 2020.

We also looking for PR help in Asia to help with promotion, PR etc.

Thanks, 73 and appreciate any offers of help!
Respectfully,

Stu K6TU
Makrothen RTTY Contest Manager
On behalf of Pizza Lovers 259