Unfortunately, I don’t think having a VHF Club sponsor the contest is a
workable solution. The club sponsorship of the Sprints has been less than
spectacular, through no fault of the volunteers who organize them each year.
The club’s simply lack the marketing muscle to properly promote the contests
and generate enthusiasm for participation. Seeing your callsign listed in a
magazine may seem like silly motivation, but it’s hard to question it’s
effectiveness. The prestige of winning an ARRL or CQ sponsored contest is
greater than winning a club sponsored event—and it’s hard to overcome that.
Personally, I’d like to see the ARRL return to sponsorship of the Sprints. I’d
also like to see the Sprints combined into all-band short duration VHF/UHF
contests. I think this would generate more excitement and activity than
spreading them out across multiple dates for individual bands.
It would be easier and more fun to operate all bands for a four hour period of
intense activity than it is to do that over and over again.
But today’s announcement makes it seem unlike the ARRL is in the mood to pick
up more sponsorships for VHF/UHF contests. Rather it seems likely that they’ll
move towards less sponsorships.
CQ struggles to keep their publishing effort afloat, so I don’t hold out much
help for them either.
Perhaps a commercial enterprise, like DX Engineering who does a great job
marketing their products to the amateur community would want to “own” a major
contest like this—and tie it to their product line. At it’s core, this is a
marketing problem.
Seeing your callsign published in one of DX Engineering’s quarterly catalogs
would be almost as much fun as QST.
73,
Les Rayburn, N1LF
121 Mayfair Park
Maylene, AL
EM63nf
Member WTFDA, IRCA, NRC. Former CPC Chairman for NRC & IRCA.
Elad FDM-S2 SDR, AirSpy SDR, Quantum Phaser, Wellbrook ALA1530 Loop, Wellbrook
Flag, Clifton Labs Active Whip.
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