[VHFcontesting] Contesting Philosophy

[Nate Duehr]

On Aug 18, 2009, at 11:01 AM, Zack Widup wrote:

> I thought he was referring to who won, for example, in 1976? I know  
> if you
> have the QST collection on CD (or all the volumes on paper) you can  
> go and
> find them, but they aren't on line anywhere that I know of.

Correct.  Always found it curious that there's no readily-available  
historical record of the category winners, or any "depth charts"  
beyond that.

Even with rules-changes over the decades changing the overall scores,  
it'd still be interesting to look at the history.  I can find out how  
many times a bike rider, or NASCAR driver won... or see how many times  
an Astronaut has been up... with just a Google search.  Google most  
ham contests and you won't find any history on them, hardly at all.   
You only find the record-setting scores and distance records (not  
necessarily during a contest).

I have an uncle who's a baseball statistics nut, and there's giant  
books with every play, every pitch... but with many ham radio  
contests, there's not even readily available history of even the  
winners...?

Just a thought... not really concerned about it all that much.  Just  
found it "curious" when I thought about it and went searching one day.

It's not just the VHF contests really, either.  I can kinda see when  
QST was chock full of contest information and it was a reason to get  
membership and/or buy the magazine... but today with the lower number  
of overall pages and contest data, it seems the website would be an  
inexpensive place to keep the "historical" records of the Contesting  
branch?

Probably a Catch-22... too expensive to dig out all that data from  
paper and put it in an online database to display it somewhere...

--
Nate Duehr, WY0X
nate at natetech.com