> In an effort to stimulate activity on VHF/UHF bands beyond 70 CM, I’d
> like to suggest the creation of a Five Band VUCC (5B VUCC) award that
> would closely mirror the 5 Band DXCC Award.
I think a 5B VUCC award is a fun idea, and I also like making satellites
(or at least, sats that actually use VHF/UHF bands - there's a 10m/15m
sat in the works) one of the bands. I could go either way on sats, but
whatever. I like the extra bit of recognition for getting on more
bands.
However, I also don't think it's going to do a whole lot to increase
activity on the bands. I think what we need to do is increase operating
activities and address some of the problems of operating on these bands.
Here's what I see:
* As many others have said, add awards for rovers, grid expeditioners,
etc. AMSAT has a rover award. Perhaps that could be a model to follow
for non-sat activities.
* Get more people doing Summits on the Air with their HTs, and get more
people doing microwave activations. I believe there's a fair amount of
microwave SOTA activity in the UK. We need to get that going over here
too. I'm including myself - I do a lot of SOTA, own an FT-818 and a
23cm transverter and a short loop yagi, and never take them anywhere. I
am going to change that.
We need people doing activations with 70cm and 1.25m too. Portable
radios and antennas for those bands are readily available. We just need
to start carrying them and start notifying people at home to look for us
on those bands.
This also has the advantage of increasing activity throughout the year,
not just contest weekends.
* Get all those people with an HT or a mobile in their car to use them
in contests. There's a lot of people with a dual bander out there
driving around on contest weekends, worth three points each. How can we
get them involved?
* Come up with some other activity days besides contests. I think there
are theoretically scheduled VHF/UHF activity days, but does anyone
actually do them? What's the motivation to do so? Should we have grid
nets? Additional sprints? CW or digital mode specific events? Set up
a website for tracking records for longest contact or highest data rate
or who knows what else?
* How do we get people to move up to higher and higher bands? The gear
is expensive (SG Labs is changing that, but still) and the gear is
complicated (sequencers, IF radios, coax relays, etc.). You can make it
less expensive by building stuff but then you need test gear and tiny
soldering skills. You can get around some of that by being lucky enough
to know someone who's getting rid of gear for cheap.
I don't know how to do it, but we need to find a way to get people
interested in these bands and then mentor them through building a
station.
* If you get through all those problems, there's the fact that success
relies so heavily on a good location. For some people, the problem is
population density. For other people (like me), it's living in a hole.
The way around this is to become a rover, or start doing SOTA, or point
your antennas at the sky for sats or meteor scatter or whatever. We
just need to get the word out about all these things and the activity
will come.
--
Chris Lumens - KG6CIH
Hike * MTB * XC Ski * Haskell
Research - Experimentation - Testing - More Testing
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