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Steve Bonine · July 14th 08, 02:30 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.moderated

wrote:

It is, after all, a hobby.

I disagree!

For some of us, it's a hobby. For others, it's their life. There is a
huge difference between someone who spends a few hours working a contest
from their home station with a simple transceiver and a dipole, versus
one of the "big guns" who has invested huge amounts of time and money
building the ultimate contest station with stacked beams up 150 feet on
top of a mountain.

I think it's much more accurate to describe amateur radio contesting
as a form of sport rather than "a hobby". An amateur sport, of course,
but still a sport just like baseball, bicycle racing, golf or tennis.
There's competition, rules, skill of the players, improvements in
equipment, and constant discussion about what should be allowed and
what shouldn't.

And I still yearn for the years when the Olympics were limited to true
amateurs.

Here's an example that illustrates what I'm trying to say. Bridge is a
card game. I enjoy playing it. Many years ago, four of my friends
played bridge during their lunch hour at work. One of them was on
vacation, so they asked me to fill in for him. I flubbed playing a
hand, and the three of them were so upset that they wouldn't speak to me
for a week. These people had taken a card game into territory where I
don't care to tread. That doesn't make their daily game "bad"; it's
just not something that I personally care for.

The same thing can be said of any sport, and I agree that ham radio
contesting is the same way. There are cutthroat competitors out there,
some of whom have spent vast amounts of time and money building the
ultimate contest station. Of course they want to come up with a huge
score, and they will go to great lengths to achieve their goal. OK,
different strokes for different folks. That's not what I enjoy about a
contest, but it's certainly their prerogative to enjoy those aspects.

I'd hate for it to degenerate too much into
bean counting.

But just because we don't get paid for doing it doesn't mean it
shouldn't be taken seriously. If anything, amateur sports are a place
to take these things very seriously, because the outcome doesn't
matter as much as the game.

There are different levels of "serious". There are different
motivations for entering a ham radio contest.

But to get back to the original question of whether there is an
effective way to "level the playing field" relative to use of technology
in a ham radio contest. My personal conclusion is that the current
simple rules of putting people into broad categories based on power,
number of operators, "assistance", and so on are good enough. There are
just too many variables to go any farther. I'd rather see the handicap
system be crude than try to improve it by adding lots of additional
factors, especially when they're impossible to measure.

Someone sitting in a super station with stacked beams at 150 feet has an
inherent advantage over me with my dipole. But how much of an
advantage? Is it ten times easier for them to make a QSO? If we're
going to "level the playing field", what handicap factor should we use?
There's no simple way to deduce it.

Auto racing is probably the best example. It is probably possible to
build a car that could win the Indy 500 easily, by simply having so
much speed, power and fuel tank capacity that no existing Indy-car
could keep up. But such a car would have to break several Indy-car
restrictions such as engine displacement and fuel tank size, and would
not be allowed to race.

How many thousands of pages of rules and specifications do you suppose
there are that spell out in great detail exactly what is allowed in a
car that can enter such a race? That's exactly the kind of thing I'm
trying to avoid.

The factors that are used now to determine contest class are easy to
measure -- things like input power to the transmitter, number of
operators, spotting receivers. The result is some leveling of the
playing field. Adding additional factors would improve the handicap
system, but at the cost of adding complexity and forcing entrants to
make subjective evaluations. I don't think that there would be enough
improvement to justify increasing the complexity of the rules.

It might be an interesting exercise to research the top ten finishers in
popular contests and compare their equipment and techniques. I'm sure
that avid contesters do this, sort of like football teams that review
the tapes of their competitors' games. How much does the hardware
(location, antenna, state-of-the-art radios) contribute to the score,
compared to operator skill?

73, Steve KB9X