I haven't been that active recently in either club activities or actual
contest operation so I may have missed something. Now that I am
starting to pay more attention to this stuff again it appears that the
rules (or process, or interpretation of rules) for adding up the club
scores for cqww has changed. What I remember was that if a club had 2/3
of the operators at a multi-op they would get the whole score. What I
am hearing now is that the score gets divided up so that a club only
gets a percentage of the score based on the percentage of it's members
at a multi-op.
This has apparently caused the club I belong to to change its
proceedures for signing up members to make it easier to join. Now by
itself this is good, originally you had to attend one of the 6
pre-scheduled and bylaw required 'Regular Meetings' at the one and only
official club meeting location... You can now sign up at all sorts of
'Special Meetings' that happen much more often and in various locations
around the club area. But this also leads to the buying of members to
get their score, where someone isn't all that interested to plop down
the $20 our bylaws require for membership we can buy them in and get the
score(apparently not all clubs require dues from members just for this
reason).
Now while this might force some clubs to change bylaws to make it easier
to be called a 'Member' and get their call on that magical list that all
the club score contributions get checked against, I still think it is
bad... I used to frequently invite local S.O.B.'s (Shack On Belt hams)
here to see what HF contesting was about, and I would invite those in my
license upgrade classes here to operate, but with this change I would be
discouraged from doing that as the club would want me to sign them up as
a member so they wouldn't lose the points. This situation leads to one
of the following options:
1. Convince the operator to join, possibly convincing them at the same
time that contest rules and clubs are too picky and not for fun.
2. Buy the operator into the club even if they aren't interested,
therefore definately convincing them that contest rules and clubs are
not for fun.
3. Leave them off the operator list, which risks upsetting them if they
are interested and remember to check next year's magazine.... forgetting
the possibilities of being against the rules this is just bad pr and may
totally turn off a future contester.
4. Put them on the list without joining the club and deflate the efforts
of the rest of the operators who do belong to the club. Note that in a
case like mine these visiting or training ops frequently would only make
a handful of contacts but would take away a full share of points.
5. Take all multi-op rosters after a contest and add all the calls to
the club roster.
I wonder how many multi-ops for other clubs used to have a number of
non-members participate but now are 100% members? And which method
above did they use to get there?
--
David Robbins K1TTT (ex KY1H)
k1ttt@berkshire.net or robbins@berkshire.net
http://www.berkshire.net/~robbins/k1ttt.html
--
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