We would like to address the inactivity of our contest administration during the past few months. Our contest and committee is ran and chaired by a bunch of highschoolers. When the school season swung around, the administration and website maintenance was too much to add on top of our school workloads. With some tasks such as log submissions being handled with automation and some tasks that had to be handled manually such as notifying results, it got to a point where the contest was ran virtually unattended. We apologize for our inconsistencies and lack of attention to our contest in these past few months.
Starting today, we are now back to work on expanding the Worldwide Sideband Activity Contest. With our aforementioned log robot, we are in the planning stages of adding more features to our logs.wwsac site. Some additions will include statistics for operators, log checking and busting, and automated emails. In regards to log checking, we are not imposing any penalties to busted and duped calls. Instead, we are offering log checks in order to help you improve your contest and copy skills.
We are amidst an email hosting change. We did not realize how expensive it would be to use a premium service like Google’s Gsuite. It was decided that it would be more economical and consistent to use one email with a more basic hosting site. The new email will be set up in the next few weeks. Temporary email will be PatrickW9GGG(at)gmail.com.
The rules for WWSAC will have a facelift. We are not changing any of the rules, just rewording and dusting the surfaces. We want the contest to be adopted by people who have never contested before. By making the rules easier to understand, WWSAC’s audience will become larger. We are also planning some additional changes to the rules sometime around the start of 2021. We’re gonna add some extra ways to compete that might involve your neighbors, and perhaps your club.
You might need to search the bands more thoroughly in future sessions. We want to add a bonus station in our contest. It has been a popular discussion in our planning to have a club call for WWSAC. The plan we sorted out is to have someone notably young sign up and operate a personal station remotely with the club call. Those participating in the contest will be able to count the QSO for more points. We will have an update on this soon.
WWSAC’s participation is nearly 100% word of mouth. Our participants have mostly been our friends, the friends of their friends, and those just turning the dial and picking up running stations. Though our contest hasn’t been promoted outside of word of mouth, it’s been really neat to see everyone’s friends participating. Please, tell a friend about WWSAC! We want to see a log from a friend of your friend’s friend populate the results on log.wwsac!
This concludes our update on the Worldwide Sideband Activity Contest. We hope you’re having a great fall season so far, and we pray for good weather, good propagation, and good health for each and every operator! See you on the air!
73 from the WWSAC Committee: Patrick W9GGG, Charles AA4LS, Connor W4IPC, Mason KM4SII, Brayden KC1KUG, Kees “Car Keys” W0AAE
Hi all,
ReplyDeleteI figured once school started up again, you’d be busy with that. This is still a great contest, looking forward to the bonus station and other stuff in store for the new year. FYI, WW1SAC isn’t in QRZ.COM, maybe that would be a great call for the club.
When I make a contact with someone in the contest who doesn’t pass the exchange (obviously isn’t familiar with the context), I give a little spiel about it and give out the website as well. I’ve heard KW8N also doing that. After the contest, I’ll usually send them a message on qrz.com to thank them for working me and encouraging them to show up the following week. I hope these efforts are building the number of participants.
You’ve got this OM’s support for sure, as well the support of others who are regular participants.
All the best from Texas,
Jeff Nyberg, KF5KWO