OK, contesting sure gets a lot of heat from non-contesters lately. Forgive me if this sounds like a rant (its not, really) but someone needs to defend the honor of the contester and hopefully give a little perspective and make a few points that maybe some havent considered. I understand contesting is not for everyone. Neither is ragchewing, or sending the same macros over and over on PSK, or exchanging 599 signal reports with a guy sitting on a rock in the South China Sea that you can barely hear, or checking into nets every night with no traffic, or chatting on 2m repeaters with the same six people, or chasing counties, or bouncing signals off satellites, or sending WA1XYZ WW2PT RRR on JT65. But to say any of these things is not fun or not real ham radio (as Ive seen countless times in countless threads) simply makes my eyes roll. Ive done almost all of these things over the years and Ive had plenty of fun in the process because each of them required me to learn something new, and THAT is what makes ham radio both fun and real. At least for me. Now, Im not a big time contester -- far from it, in fact -- but if I had the budget, time, brains and skill I sure would aspire to be one. Im lucky to scrape together 20,000 points in most contests I work, but I enjoy it immensely and it makes me a better operator. And to build a competitive contest station would require me to learn a lot of stuff I barely understand now about antennas and station design -- one doesnt just open a catalog and order a contest station! Contesting is to ham radio what Formula One is to automobiles. It advances the state of the art because it tests the equipment at the highest levels of performance. If you like disc brakes, electronic transmissions, paddle shifters, turbochargers, traction control, active suspension, aerodynamics, pneumatic valves, and variable electronic timing in your cars, you can thank Formula 1 for if not inventing these things then certainly perfecting them under the most extreme conditions, and for advancing the engineering art that eventually allowed them to trickle down to even your most basic econoboxes. The same is true with contesting and ham radio equipment -- do you think all of these modern radios just ended up with the kind of awesome filtering and strong signal handling performance we now enjoy because some engineers in a vacuum thought of these things on their own? No. When they set out to design the next high-end radio, they talk to contesters (and sometimes they even listen!) to find out how they can improve upon the current equipment on the market. Trust me, they dont talk to ragchewers who sit on a single 75m phone frequency night after night talking about the weather and their heart medicine. The contesters are the ones who drop the big wads of cash for the IC-7800s, Orions, and K3s, radios which were designed in large part for the big-gun contester and DXer, not your average ham. Contesters buy these rigs in the largest numbers, their purchases cover the manufacturers R&D expenses, and by doing so allow the features and design elements you see on the top-of-the-line rigs today to eventually find its way down to the most entry-level rigs tomorrow. Yeah, some contesters can be dickish. Yeah, contests can be inconvenient (just like closing the streets of Monaco or Singapore for a motor race). And yeah, the bigger contests tend to take over big chunks of the bands for a whole weekend. But they never hog ALL of ANY band; there are always places where you can find space for a ragchew, even on 20m. And they have as much right to use the spectrum as anyone else. Contesting is practically as old as ham radio itself, it has earned its place in the hobby, and has given back to the hobby as much as (if not more than) any other ham radio discipline. So when the $1,200 radio you buy in a few years has brick-wall DSP filtering and better than 100dB of close-spaced dynamic range, allowing you to ragchew on 3989 kHz about the weather without getting creamed by Joe Bob Megawatt on 3992 talking about his heart medication, be sure to thank a contester. :-)
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 09:35:52 +0000
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