WRTC makes Front Page in San Diego UNION!

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/jul/09/tp-no-rest-for-weary-in-a-contact-sport/
Front page of July 9th edition! Features story writeup on Contestant John Barcroft K6AM of our San Diego DX Club, and Glen Rattmann K6NA who is acting as a Contest Referee!
Great PR for Ham Radio!

 

Good to see some Ham Radio related articles in the news. Good for John and Glen.

 

Quotes from the news article:

"The San Diego resident is in Boston this week for the World Cup of amateur radio, a quirky round-the-clock contest featuring 59 two-person teams from 38 countries"

"But there are still more than 700,000 people in the United States serious enough about it to be licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, serious enough to form their own clubs and make their own T-shirts (“Ham Radio is a Contact Sport”), serious enough to keep life lists, like bird-watchers, of every country they’ve visited via short-wave radio."

Why is it that when anyone in the news media covers a story about Amateur Radio, they always add comments that seem to imply that Hams are a little weird or strange.

For instance:
The round-the-clock contest being quirky or the fact that we're serious enough to form clubs or make our own T-shirts or to keep lists (meaning logs) of the countries that we've contacted.

There's nothing QUIRKY about contesting & there's nothing WEIRD about keeping a list of our contacts or forming clubs & making Ham Radio T-shirts etc.!

I never see these kind of comments being made about stamp collectors or people who collect & trade baseball cards or whatever other myriad of hobbies that people are into.

 

Congrats to John K6AM. WRTC 2014 started July 8, and runs thru July 14. I posted about it two years ago in this thread.

The official WRTC 2014 website is here. Participants are selected from a list of those who placed the highest in past select contests. If you want to know how well (or poorly) you did, you will want to visit this site.

Don W7NG was a Referee for one of the teams in 2010. At a meeting of the Western Washington DX Club in 2011, he did a slide presentation of his personal photos from that event. It was VERY interesting.

vy 73,
Bryan WA7PRC

 

Was there last night:The opening ceremony was awesome and the excitement was palpable. GL to all teams and everyone else should make a point of giving them out Q's during the IARU this weekend.

73
Chip W1YW

 

This is indeed good news.

 

I resemble that remark...

 

For most of the population, others are weird to do wireless using the ether without paying subscriber fees, and even more so doing it with homebuilt or heavily modified equipment.

 

Hey, Pat!

It's properly called the San Diego Union-Tribune.

By the way, it's unlikely that article would have appeared on the front page before it was it was purchased by Doug Manchester, a real estate billionaire who knows absolutely nothing about newspaper publishing.

73,

KJ6BSO

 

Looks like he finished 35th, is that right or just raw score?

 

Thanks Carl! Maybe Doug is interested in Ham Radio! He can afford a HIBERLING!!!

 

I don't know how it was scored, but looking at the final totals, most of the scores are pretty close. Winning score was 7.5 Million. John and Dave had 5.4 Million. I would have scored about 50 (no not MILLION! FIFTY!) I am sure John and Dave did their very best! I was watching the totals as the contest progressed. At one point I saw them in 11th place!

 

Speaking of scoring why are there blanks on the leaderboard what I have read it was supposed to be realtime scoring using some fancy networking with a hot spot?

Hey Pat they should do WRTC here on the west coast because we all know you can't DX from here!!! Hi HI

 

Pat, I had the pleasure of being both John and Dave's site manager...also had the pleasure of meeting Andy,LZ2HM, their referee...
Obviously, there wasn't a lot of interaction between John and Dave...very serious, as to be expected...but Andy was riot
all weekend..a fun person to be around.
It was interesting for us on site to see the live-score...knowing John and Dave had no way of knowing.
A lot of work for us to setup and tear down, but worth every minute.