Doesn’t appear this will affect our W4NH Mult-Op
operation in Jan. But it would be interesting to have our Director Doug, K4AC,
comment about what approval process this latest set of rules changes actually went
through before being enacted.
Ron
WW8RR
From: Fourlanders
[mailto:fourlanders-bounces@contesting.com] On
Behalf Of whensley11@comcast.net
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2015
11:22 AM
To: Fourlanders
Subject: [Fourlanders] Fwd: New
VHF contest rules
For those that don't subscribe, this from
the VHF reflector.
Happy New Year, everybody!!
Kim - WG8S
The new rules for the January VHF contest, just published online yesterday
(12/31/2014), are very interesting--and very different from the rules proposed
by ARRL's board-level Ad Hoc Subcommittee on VHF Revitalization in November.
The ad hoc committee requested feedback from the field with a Dec. 15
deadline. The proposed rule revisions and member feedback were to be
considered by the ARRL Programs and Services Committee at a meeting just before
the annual meeting of the full ARRL Board of Directors in mid-January--or so I
assumed from what I read.
Meanwhile, someone (presumably the headquarters staff) drafted new rules and
put them into effect for the January VHF contest. The new rules create
three new entry categories: single operator unlimited high power, single
operator unlimited low power and single operator unlimited portable. This
will bring the number of categories in the January VHF Contest up to 13.
During the years when the largest percentage of licensed amateurs in the
In contrast, the rules proposed by the ad hoc committee would allow any
operator to use assistance, regardless of entry category. No new
categories were proposed. Rovers in any category were to be allowed not
only to use spotting assistance but also to do such things as announce their
arrival in a new grid square on a repeater, on the internet, etc. Rovers
in the 10 GHZ and up contest already announce their arrivals at new places on
repeaters, at least in
There's certainly room to debate the merits of the staff-written version of the
rules as opposed to what the board-level committee publicly proposed. My
own opinion is that there are already too many categories in VHF contests,
including several that attract only a few participants. I don't think
adding three more categories for assisted single operators is the answer. I
think it's time to allow modern forms of assistance such as spotting across the
board.
But what's more interesting to me is that the new rules seem to have been
adopted before the board-level Programs and Services Committee or the full
Board of Directors could meet and consider the issue.
This gives me a real sense of deja vu. I'm not a member of the current ad
hoc committee, but I was attending ARRL Board meetings as an elected vice
director in 1991, when two very important changes in VHF contest rules were
implemented without any discussion at a board meeting (unless I slept through
the whole thing). League Lines in the May, 1991 QST announced two new
categories in VHF contests: limited (four-band) multioperator and rover.
Until then, all multioperators were in one category and rovers were
treated as single operators (with their scores in various grid squares listed
separately). Hindsight tells us that the limited multioperator category
caused a large drop in activity on the higher bands and took away incentive for
groups to upgrade their stations to new bands. It did, of course, create
a way for smaller multioperator groups to win without having to compete with
the best-equipped groups in the northeast. And the rover category led to
all sorts of controversy--and four major rule revisions over the ensuing 20
years.
Whatever the merits of the new rules, I wish rule changes of this magnitude
could be formally discussed at the ARRL board level, or at least by a board
committee, before being enacted.
73, Wayne, N6NB