[VHFcontesting] UHF Contest Cancellation

[Les Rayburn]

Unfortunately, I don’t think having a VHF Club sponsor the contest is a workable solution. The club sponsorship of the Sprints has been less than spectacular, through no fault of the volunteers who organize them each year.

The club’s simply lack the marketing muscle to properly promote the contests and generate enthusiasm for participation. Seeing your callsign listed in a magazine may seem like silly motivation, but it’s hard to question it’s effectiveness. The prestige of winning an ARRL or CQ sponsored contest is greater than winning a club sponsored event—and it’s hard to overcome that. 

Personally, I’d like to see the ARRL return to sponsorship of the Sprints. I’d also like to see the Sprints combined into all-band short duration VHF/UHF contests. I think this would generate more excitement and activity than spreading them out across multiple dates for individual bands. 

It would be easier and more fun to operate all bands for a four hour period of intense activity than it is to do that over and over again. 

But today’s announcement makes it seem unlike the ARRL is in the mood to pick up more sponsorships for VHF/UHF contests. Rather it seems likely that they’ll move towards less sponsorships. 

CQ struggles to keep their publishing effort afloat, so I don’t hold out much help for them either. 

Perhaps a commercial enterprise, like DX Engineering who does a great job marketing their products to the amateur community would want to “own” a major contest like this—and tie it to their product line. At it’s core, this is a marketing problem. 

Seeing your callsign published in one of DX Engineering’s quarterly catalogs would be almost as much fun as QST. 


73,

Les Rayburn, N1LF
121 Mayfair Park
Maylene, AL 
EM63nf

Member WTFDA, IRCA, NRC. Former CPC Chairman for NRC & IRCA. 

Elad FDM-S2 SDR, AirSpy SDR, Quantum Phaser, Wellbrook ALA1530 Loop, Wellbrook Flag, Clifton Labs Active Whip.