[SCCC] Field Day - Please help out the locals

[Ryan Huggins]

Thank you Steve! Being new I greatly appreciate the background. Seems like it wouldn't be as big of a problem if D to D got eliminated as I thought.

Yes, for the "not a contest" there sure are a lot of contest-like bragging rights. We have the internal conflict within our club as well. Some insist it IS a contest, while others insist it is not. The one who is in the "not" camp (and even has a shirt that says "it's not a contest") runs the Simi Valley site... which was the smallest this year... which may explain why it's "not" a contest. :-) But at the end of the day, it's still a fun and collaborative effort. The Simi club gets to use the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library grounds and does massive amounts of PR and introducing people to radio. We lack that as our site is well off the beaten path. The site out in Oxnard this year had the police stop by... because they needed the ham's help finding out what was causing interference on their radios! Now that is some serious bragging rights.

I wish I knew what the secret sauce was for the club. I'm also a member of the SCDXC and got that email as well. Like with FD, I was a tentative on the BBQ and willing to help and communicated it to Howard, but it was cancelled before I could solidify my calendar. I'd have considered volunteering for one of the positions, but being up here in Thousand Oaks, their meetings are a many hour drive from me and that's not something I'm willing to do. Plus I'm stepping into a leadership position with my local business association for the next three years, so I'm putting anything else on hold. Depending on the time required, I might help with the newsletter though. That I think can be done from home.

There are a few other members of the Conejo Club in SCCC who have been around longer than I have, maybe some of them have some insight into what makes CVARC so special. I know we bill ourselves as a "social club that does contesting" but we are definitely not a die-hard contesting group. Maybe it was the great band conditions this year, but from what I heard about our site, people were just dialed in and working the bands like crazy.

The club is very friendly and welcoming and has a good mix of the grey hairs and people in their 20s and 30s. All get along well and the "Elmers" (which for digital I'm apparently one now) are happy to help. I think anyone who is grumpy or of the "that's not real radio" mindset is politely asked to leave, so that does help. There are good presentations each month and we have something going on daily in the club. There is a daily morning net (except for Sunday), a Saturday night "After Dark" net that's more non-radio than radio, and a Sunday "Newbie Net". I run a weekly 15m roundtable (21.333 at 7pm) on Wednesdays. One of the club members takes off his club hat and puts on his club-agnostic "Bored Net" hat and puts together a monthly "micro field day" where people from all over get together and operate. At one of the previous events (a POTA 2-fer) we had a guy who drove over an hour from deep inside LA to come up and radio with us. It's open to all. The Bored Net is even putting on a "Micro Expo" in August up at Cal State Channel Islands and it will be the Santa Barbara Section's annual meeting as well. Dick Norton will be there too. No vendors, just hams doing ham things.

One thing that is pretty unique about our section, is that the Ventura and Conejo clubs is that we both do a LOT of teaching and testing. Conejo has the even months and Ventura the odd months for VE sessions and the opposite for teaching (so we can have VE sessions at the training sites to make it easy for the students). This year Conejo has started doing two classes each month, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. There's been that much demand for the different courses. One is usually the tech level and the other is either a General or Extra level. Two months back I was a VE and we had a 10 year old get his tech license. Last year the Air National Guard station all took our classes and got their licenses through us. We also advertise our club at the trainings and the tests.

One thing though, there is no promotion of anything beyond the club. I have a competitive streak (so for me Field Day is a contest, just like the QRZ leaderboard is one for me) and it wasn't until I was submitting for a contest that I saw there was such a thing as the So Cal Contest Club. It was through this club that I learned that the SCDXC existed. Maybe some collaboration between the local general interest radio clubs and the specialty clubs (like SCCC and SCDXC) could help grow their memberships.

I probably have more to say, but I'm running up against a deadline to go show a home, so I will end with this. I am more than happy to make introductions to the section manager (he's a regular attendee at our club), the gentleman who created The Bored Net, and our club's leadership on behalf of SCCC if you'd like to discuss collaboration or how they do things things further with them.

-73
Ryan, KI6BTY

On Sunday, June 23rd, 2024 at 11:58 PM, Steve Harrison <k0xp at k0xp.com> wrote:

> On 6/23/2024 10:52 PM, Ryan Huggins wrote:
>
>> Dino,
>>
>> ......If that rule went into effect I suspect they'd need to change the exchange then to spell out what your station class is prior to making the contact. Otherwise there would be a lot of people upset at the wasted time and I'd suspect that would have a significant impact on the alpha site scores too, as I'd imagine that if you had to go through the exchange just to find out you can't count it, that would upset a LOT of people, myself included.
>
> Prior to 2020 when that rule was invoked due to COVID. there were VERY few D stations... and even fewer Es. Ds working Ds happened so infrequently that you simply counted such a Q similar to having worked a dupe and moved on; nobody ever got upset about working a "doesn't count" D when you, yourself were a D. In all the years that I operated 40m CW with W6TRW, I doubt I ever worked more than a half dozen Ds per year and Es were almost unheard of. (Of course, these days, with affordable LiFePO4 batteries, solar panels, etc., it's a LOT easier to be a class E than it ever was before. Had I operated FD this year from home, I would have been 1E.)
>
> If they'd get rid of that rule, then there would once again be many fewer people operating FD from home; problem solved.
>
>> So you know what my experience is, the three clubs in Ventura County had 41 stations setup between them, which is the same number of stations we put together county-wide last year. The club I belong to, The Conejo Valley ARC was the largest (likely in the country... again) as a 21 Alpha.
>
> Omi... it was the Conejo club that beat the all-time record that SCCC old-timers set back in the '80s! I have no idea whether Conejo's "new" record has been eclipsed by now, but most likely it has.
>
>> .............Last year three of the top six scoring clubs in the nation........
>
> And the ARRL insists that Field Day is NOT a contest... yet almost everybody serious about FD is in it for their club's bragging rights! 8-D
>
>> ....... were right here in Ventura County. I do not say this to brag, but to illustrate that we have a very robust Field component and participation out here. Our club was not hurting for people to operate stations and there were only a couple of B or D stations in operation out here.
>
> The Southern California DX Club, as well as SCCC itself, would be MOST interested in learning just how you folks have managed to not only keep your membership count so high, but also keep the competitive spirit up there! Both SCDXC and SCCC need infusion of guys who have the gumption to compete these days. Unfortunately, both organizations seem to be primarily composed, today, of gray- and white-haired retired old geezers who've been playing radio since the 1960s and 70s (I know: I'm onna them), and are all but burned out nowadays. Heck's Bells: just today, I received an e-mail warning that without people stepping up to volunteer for any of the half dozen officer positions in our next election, the SCDXC will likely dissolve itself after December of this year, closing out a 73-year career. In the olden days, SCDXC, alone, used to have a dozen, sometimes two dozen scores for most of the larger contests. Today, nobody bothers to contribute to SCDXC's club score, and SCCC is lucky to exceed a half dozen scores for the CQ WW, sometimes the ARRL DX, and the CQ WW WPX, as well as the CQP. Of course, the fact that digital QSOs now count the same as CW for DXCC has a lot to do with that burnout, as does the fact that just about everybody who's anybody in the SCDXC is already on the DXCC Honor Roll, and thus has very little left to accomplish with DXing. {puts on flame suit real quick inna hurry...}
>
>> I do not doubt that the rules have made it so that clubs are hurting for people for their Alpha stations, out here in my corner of the Santa Barbara Section it is not the case.
>
> Why is that, do you think, Ryan? What has made the Sanata Barbara section so robust and active?
>
> Steve, K0XP