[VHFcontesting] Let's make the contests do what they were supposed to do

[John Hawkinson]

Tommy phone <tholmes at woh.rr.com> wrote on Sat,  3 Jan 2015
at 22:35:21 -0500 in <6C384267-B756-409F-BB60-D07371F451AB at woh.rr.com>:

> So how about taking a clean sheet of paper approach to this? Design
> a new set of rules and contest structure to better achieve the goals
> of increasing activity and providing a reasonably level playing
> field.

> Set a target of having it ready to go two years from now and with
> commonality across the ARRL, CQ, and sprints.

I think a much more practical approach is to have one contest adopt a 
new structure and beta test it. Much easier to get buy-in if something
works, much easier to experiment one at a time.

It seems to me that a lot of people don't know about the Sprints, and that
more would operate in them if they did. That's a marketing problem.

What can we do to increase awareness?

Can the ARRL feature them? Obviously they're not an ARRL contest, but
why should that be a bar? Maybe the ARRL can be offered a co-sponsorship
in exchange for some marketing?


p.s.: A mitigating workaround to too many categories may be to
authorize/encourage the ARRL Contest Branch staff to merge categories
in the results at their discretion.

--jhawk at mit.edu
  John Hawkinson
  KB1CGZ