I tend to agree with a lot of what Ken has to say. Like Ken, I'm in my
early 40s - but was licensed since I was 13.
Contesting to me has very little to do with "gaming". My son does a lot
of gaming and the parallels simply aren't there. Most games are limited
duration events (maybe an hour at very most, but often 20 minutes), have
a set goal or target, and often involve a small team. You see this in
Call of Duty, Destiny, the Division, and other games.
To me, contesting is much more akin to "competitive" running. You have
contests of varying lengths - akin to 5Ks, 10Ks, 10 milers, half
marathons, marathons etc. Almost nobody is going to win a 10K the first
time they slap on a pair of ASICS and mot people are never going to take
the pole position in a race. In events like the local elementary school
5K (akin to NAQP or a state QSO party), a big goal would be to win your
age/sex bracket. To win a 10K or a half marathon, takes real ability,
real training, and real drive. Some folks (like me) will likely never
win a running race, but then again I don't expect to. What I expect to
do is improve my run time - place in a certain level in my grouping and
finish the damned race.
First time I did a 5K, I simply wanted to finish, to run in less than 30
minutes, and not embarrass myself. I succeed on all three goals. I was
nearly 12 minutes slower than the fastest 5K time, but I had no belief I
would win. Same with my first 10K: simply finish, run the 10K in less
than 60 minutes, and not embarrass myself. I succeeded here again.
Just with contesting, you're not going to win the first time. But, now
and again, you may surprise yourself. From my little home QTH which
features a homebrew yagi dangling from a tree and two fan dipoles, I
managed to win SOHP-mixed mode in the ARRL 10 for all of Virginia.
Quite satisfying for that to happen. I'd consider ARRL 10 akin to a 10K
and to have won my bracket was a great feat - something I'd want to repeat.
If you take the mindset that you're not going to win right out of the
gate and that you need to hone your skills, contesters too can enjoy the
sport.
73 Rich NN3W
On 12/19/2016 4:25 PM, Kenneth E. Harker wrote:
Here is my perspective. For background, I was first licensed at age 20 while attending
college and I’m now 44. In addition to HF and VHF contesting, I am active in
IARU-style Amateur Radio Direction Finding, and have competed as a member of team USA at
three ARDF World Championships. Not all sports are head-to-head. As others have mentioned,
HF contesting (and ARDF) are both more in the style of races - albeit races in which you have
to perform certain tasks between the start and the finish. They allow you to take pride in
beating your own personal times/scores, in going head-to-head against a particular
rival/friend, or in winning an age/gender or transmitter/power category or the overall
competition. There are plenty of youth interested in track and field, orienteering,
swimming, etc. I’m not sure why we need to market/benchmark ourselves against
e-sports all the time.
Cost of entry can certainly be an inhibitor, even if many of us can think of ways
to get around it. We know that you can do well with more modest stations in the right
contest for your location. We know you can buy almost everything you need used, or
even borrow more expensive components for a while. We know that most super-station
owners are not contesting 52 weekends a year and are often happy to host guest
operators from time to time. But I can easily see newcomers or would-be contesters
might feel the cost of entry is daunting because they don’t know these things.
That said, many other sports have reasonably-high costs of entry, too - ever priced
how much it would cost to get into ice hockey? Or take up rally car driving?
But what I think the attraction to contesting really boils down to is whether or not you are interested in
the science of radio. If your primary interest is competition - there’s COD or CS or Halo for a fraction
of the cost. If you’re interested in collecting things - pokemon can fill that interest as well as QSL
cards. If you are interested in building things, well there’s all manner of other hobbies where you can
assemble computers, drones, minecraft castles, competitive holiday light displays, etc. What sets contesting
apart, really, is learning about the science of radio - propagation, communications techniques, antenna patterns,
figuring out how to understand foreign accents, etc. If that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to you, then
you’re probably not a great candidate for contesting and there are many alternatives out there for the
non-radio enthusiast. Contesting is a sport for people who love radio.
On a related topic, maybe we should also be trying to understand why contesting
is not more attractive to women. The percentage of women getting science and
technology degrees in universities (at least in the U.S.) has been increasing
significantly in the past 10 years. Women now account for 20% of all undergraduate
engineering science degrees in the United States and 40% of all physics and
mathematics degrees. But for a technical hobby that would seem to draw heavily from
people in those fields, contesting in particular does an abysmal job in attracting
women. At most ARDF events, I can expect 25% to 35% of the competitors to be women.
That’s an order of magnitude better representation than in contesting. My
guess is that more women in contesting would naturally attract more youth in
contesting as well.
73 de WM5R
On Dec 18, 2016, at 11:42 AM, W0MU Mike Fatchett <w0mu@w0mu.com> wrote:
I had the opportunity to talk to my son in more detail and ask him why
contesting does not interest him. Here is what we discussed.
1. Cost to get in the game and have a chance to win is prohibitive. You need
a great station, land, etc to really win or compete. The playing field is so
unbalanced that it becomes a show stopper. For him he has no costs when at
home. I consider my station modest with a 70 ft tower and land to put up Inv
L's and full sized 80m verticals and some receiving antennas. I could do more
but we have horses and they need to roam and are hell on things in the pasture.
2. You have to invest a lot of time to get good. If he can not have a really
good station then why invest the time to get good if you are not going to be
able to really compete.
2. The tools we use to contest, logging software, packet look like old dos
programs. He called them ugly and boring. He is used to amazing graphics in
games. I found this observation interesting. I feel that the tools we have
are pretty good and give me what I want to see readily available. I was not
expecting this answer.
3. He is far more interested in using packet where he can immediately chase
things. Packet essentially gives him a list of things to do or goals. It is
more visual so more interesting. He thought that more automated systems would
be interesting. Young people and even us older folk expect things to happen
much faster. They are the generation of instant satisfaction and some of that
even rubs off on us older folk.
4. Talking to someone over the airwaves is still pretty cool. You can
instantly talk around the world if the right condx exist, but we can talk all
over the world with our phones so it is not as amazing as it once was.
5. CW is interesting but he was surprised that we don't have better code
readers. While he would like to learn the code time is once again the factor.
They have so many other outlets for entertainment that it is hard to find time
for all of them.
6. Results take far too long to come out
7. He proposed that all participants use a scoreboard type system. Many of us
have said this was something we need to do but have instead met with amazing
resistance and a ton of excuses why people refuse to use it. A system where
everyone can check it out and see what is going in in the contest. We are back
to visuals.
6. Playing radio in the car driving is fun because there is not much else to do
but drive.
7. He has his general license but he does not have the technical skills or
electronic knowledge to build a shack or decent station. I am not a great
teacher especially to my own kids so I take some of the blame for this but it
is hard to teach people things when they don't want to devote much time to it.
I feel a reluctance to even try to do something without having the proper
knowledge. A far cry from when I was young and tried all sorts of silly
antennas and projects that mostly failed miserably but boy did I learn from
those mistakes.
That pretty much summed up our hour long conversation and I am no closer to
figuring out how to sell ham radio and contesting to them. I hope some will
find this information helpful and interesting.
W0MU
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|