World Radiosport Team Championship 2010

The World Radiosport Team Championship 2010 starts today in Russia near to Moscow. The event is being run by Soyuz Radioljubiteley Rossii, The Russian National amateur radio society. 50 teams from all over the world will compete in this premier contest. Visit the WRTC 2010 website http://www.wrtc2010.ru/ to find out all the details. The competition will be held in conjunction with the 2010 IARU HF World Championship. Rules for any participant can be found at http://www.arrl.org/iaru-hf-championship. The contest starts 1200z July 10 and ends 1200z July 11.

Special calls in the range of R31A to R39Z will be assigned to the competitors. A lottery prior to the contest is run for the assigning of calls, stations, and referees. The call will be given to the teams by their referee, at the station 15 minutes before the start of the contest.Good luck to Andy Cook G4PIQ from Ipswich and Dave Lawley G4BUO from Tonbridge of the United Kingdom team.

Now there may be one or two of you who are thinking like me what the heck has radio contesting got to do with sport and I have to agree with you on that to some extent, but having tried recently to compete seriously in the RSGB 80m Club Championships for the first time I can say it takes some stamina, both physically and mentally. I was a quivering wreck after an hour and a half and struggled to speak for a short while afterwards. This stuff is much more serious and these guys are going to keep up a pace that makes my QSO rate look pathetic for 16 times as long. Hats off to them.

There is real radiosport out there in the form of radio direction finding contests that resemble orienteering with a radio and a directive antenna and is radio contesting any less of a sport than say darts or snooker. So it leads me to thinking, could we as radio amateurs use this to our advantage? After all darts and snooker receive massive sponsorships. Darts and snooker get sponsors because they are widely watched on TV and ham radio contests are unlikely to generate much interest with viewers, but some quite minority sports that are not covered on TV get massive grants from sports councils and lottery funds, so why not amateur radio?

The plan then is we all start changing the names of our amateur radio clubs and societies to ‘Sportradio Club’. We then only need to run one event a year, such as a radio direction finding contest (AKA a foxhunt) and then we can all apply for some of these grants from the government and get our club shacks kitted out like GCHQ.