With respect to the new categories, there's nothing particularly odd
about the timing. The changes approved in January of 2014 (and publicly
announced in board reports) have just taken a while to work their way
through an over-burdened system. Here's my take on it - not official,
I'm not staff, I just edit contest writeups and help shovel on various
projects :-)
The ARRL Board Programs and Services Committee approved the addition of
Single-Op Unlimited categories to *all* ARRL contests at the January
2014 meeting. This was based on a recommendation in 2013 by the CAC
that was approved by the Awards Committee, THEN passed to the P&SC which
THEN passes it back to staff. Here's the report:
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/About%20ARRL/Committee%20Reports/2014/January/Doc_16.pdf
Note that the CAC recommendation (all reports are online at
http://www.arrl.org/committee-reports) only referred to HF contests but
the P&SC extended that recommendation to *all* ARRL contests. Note also
that while the P&SC report refers to the category names as "Assisted",
the actual word used in the titles is "Unlimited".
About the time of the P&SC directives in January, the ARRL Contest
Branch Manager abruptly abandoned ship, leaving a rather large backlog
and no one to manage any of the existing processes, much less add new
categories. KX9X, N1ND, and I shared those duties during the
replacement process and the current manager W1MSW was hired and started
work in July. Matt has done an awesome job getting caught up and making
sure all the processes are working as well as they can. And there was
this Centennial thing right in the middle of that, as well. Part of
that catch-up job has been to update the rules to include the previously
approved categories and this has now been accomplished with the January
VHF Contest being the final one to get the new SOU categories. Without
the unexpected personnel turnover, this would have been announced and
implemented in early 2014 and the timing would not have been an issue.
Now...as to the ad-hoc committee and other potential rule changes. The
first paragraph should give you some idea of the speed at which changes
occur. Anything the ad-hoc committee comes up with will have to be
placed on the agenda for the P&SC committee's next meeting. The
recommendations of the P&SC committee will then have to be approved by
the Board at *their* next meeting. If I am correct in understanding the
process and assuming no report from the ad-hoc committee has been
delivered, no rule change decision could be made by the board until July
at the very earliest and even next January is probably optimistic.
Furthermore, a comprehensive set of changes will likely require changes
in data processing at HQ and that will have to get in line with
everything else ARRL IT has on their plate in a very tight budget year.
In my opinion, VHF+ rule changes will happen - but it will be a while
before they are actually implemented just because of the way governance
happens in the ARRL and because of limited IT resources. To stay up to
date and prevent surprises, watch for the various committee reports as
they come out to find out what staff is being directed to do, status of
ongoing projects, and if there are any other dependencies on budget or
resources to get them done.
73, Ward N0AX
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