[VHFcontesting] ARRL Contest Branch makes online certificates available

[Tom Holmes]

I don't believe that 3830 has anything to do with ARRL; it's just a place to post your claimed score publicly supported by a separate entity. 
Frankly, I don't get all the griping about the league 'diluting' the value of a certificate. It documents what our station has accomplished over the years and shows whether we've improved relative to other stations. The published standings do that too, but my book of certificates makes it easy to review (and brag a little when I have a chance to show it to others).
It's just a piece of paper and if you get one too, it really doesn't change the value of the one I earned. They don't have any monetary value, for heavens sake!
As for criticizing the league for making them available on line, I'd say that's an improvement since I have sometimes waited nearly a year for the paper to arrive. This looks like a serious effort to improve the turnaround time and I'm sure it saves a lot on postage. 
So I say "good for them" for stepping up to a long standing problem. 

From Tom Holmes, N8ZM

> On Jul 12, 2018, at 4:15 PM, Kevin H. Phillips <kh-phillips at 9-5usa.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 7/12/2018 12:49 PM, Alex wrote:
>> I just checked it out and put in some call signs from the 3830 list and it indeed generates certificates for every entrant no matter how low the score.
>> 
>> Until now, it was reasonable to assume that if you saw an ARRL contest certificate that the person put in a reasonable effort and got a good result. Now you have to read the fine print as it could be a single digit score for placed 28th in the section.
>> 
> Just to give an example of personal experience with this, I am not a big contester and do not yet have a good VHF station that I hope to have some day (antennas too low is the main thing).  But, I do usually try to submit my logs no matter how many contacts I make because I hope it helps someone else.  I can't find it right now but I received a certificate about a year ago for the winner of a 222 contest (I think) in the entire STX section.  I had two contacts and my score was 10, or something like that.  It was as big a shock to me as anyone else.  Don't shoot the messenger!
> 
> 73
> 
> Kevin
> W5TTY
> 
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