[UK-CONTEST] HF Championships 2001

[Peter Hobbs]

Following on from the earlier discussion on planning for the future, the results of the HF Championship 2001 published in the Bulletin today made (I thought) interesting reading.  Here are tabled all UK entrants of at least two RSGB HF contests during the year.  These guys have got to represent most of the paid-up "clients" for RSGB HF contests because the list is automatically generated.  AFS is excluded for some historical reason, but here is the analysis:

Contest               Entrants

BERU                  52
ROPOCO1         44
21/28 CW           41
LF Cums             40
ROPOCO2         40
7MHz CW           37
IOTA                    36
1st 1.8                 34
2nd 1.8                26
21/28 SSB          17

Also, Derrick's report for the 2nd Slow Speed Cums for 2002 happened to catch my eye.

Of the just 22 entrants in this one, no less than 21 are G0 - 4s, most of whom will have given up their evenings in the hope of helping along a (very) few new licensees to dip their toes.  Assuming there are a few LF Cum. fans who didn't enter anything else, we have lost half the entry.  Quite a few have already made representations about this but here is evidence its hard to argue with.  Come on guys.  I'm not suggesting give up the SSs but they can so easily be integrated into the original format via an official or unofficial sub-band, as in AFS, which works so well.

And please don't let's hear any more tripe about BERU for a while. . . or I may feel motivated to have a go about IOTA (even below the poor old 7CW, oh dear oh dear!)

See y'all.

Peter G3LET

PS. Maybe I was a little unfair on the SS Cums, there appear to be three no 13s in the list, making 24 entries in all!