I'll add my support for shorter time periods. Few of us have the stamina
or interest to do all-nighters. If there had been a 24 or 12 hour
competition in WPX, I might have been motivated today to turn on the radio
and see how I did against other 12-hour (or 24-hour) people.
There's no need to add categories or change any of the rules to at least
try out the idea. Contest organizers could simply publish the results, of
any contest, in a way that enabled comparisons by BIC time - e.g., so you
could see who ranked where after the first 8 hours, 16 hours, 24 hours,
etc. of each log's activity. Then we could all at least see how we did
against others who worked about the same length of time.
There's another reason to think about this, and specifically the question
of "getting more activity", or at least not making activity worse.
In effect, we already have time-limited entry categories, in which an
operator who can't or won't do 30+ hours in the chair can spend a shorter
time in the fray and still feel competitive. We call them "multis", where
several or many ops spend a few hours each to fill the full contest time
for their station.
That's a good thing ... but as others have noted, there may be unintended
consequences. Every multi-op entrant can seriously reduce the level of
activity in the contest. If, for example, 10 people participate in a
multi-op, they use a single callsign. So there's 9 callsigns less in the
contest. Nine fewer stations for everyone else to work. That's a 90%
reduction in activity seen by everyone else. No wonder Sunday afternoon is
so slow - their single callsign has already worked everyone who's around.
I've especially noticed this in DX contests, where it's always been a
puzzle why it sometimes seems strange that a whole country has only one
active amateur station - now it's easier to explain. All the active hams
go to the one superstation to fill the contest hours, so we only see one
call from all those ops for the days of the contest.
Perhaps if those ops had a way to work the hours they can work, but still
feel like they're competing, we'd have more activity.
73,
/Jack de K3FIV
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