New 5M Contest for 2025-2026 Season

[Bill Axelrod]

New 5M Contest for 2025-2026
Season
        4/23/2025

The PVRC Officers have agreed to add a new contest to the PVRC 5M calendar
for the 2025-2026 contest season. Note that the 5M Program Rules state that
included contests must have a ‘club competition’; this means that the
sponsor must publish out-of-state club rankings in order to determine which
club wins[1]
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_-8992420301102676524__ftn1>.

State QSO Parties have always been a comfortable entry point into
contesting for many hams. Many PVRC members have been active in their home
state and sometimes other state Parties. More recently, an organization (
https://stateqsoparty.com/) has promoted the State QSO Party *Club
Challenge* with links on 3830scores.com (
https://3830scores.com/sqpsummary.php) and this has attracted even more
interest in State Parties.

As a first step to gauge the PVRC membership interest in State QSO Party (
*SQP*) competitions, the California State QSO Party (https://www.cqp.org/)
will be added to the 5M Program:

·       It is a large *SQP *and has an out-of-state club competition of its
own

·       It does not conflict with an existing 5M Program Contest

·       It occurs in October 2025 which gives time for PVRC members to
prepare and gives time for PVRC leadership to assess the interest level
after that contest and before the next batch of *SQP*s that have club
competitions of their own (March/April next year)

·       There is already significant PVRC participation and interest in the
California* SQP*: 33 logs submitted in 2024 and we were in second place.
That is a good number of logs, but the PVRC Posse has proven it can show up
with more than 100 logs if incentivized (I plan on double 5M points to
inaugurate this additional 5M contest)

·       There is already significant contest club participation: 55 logs
from the Minnesota club (the winner in 2024), 24 from FRC, 25 from YCCC, 21
from FCG. When PVRC participates more strongly in 2025, expect that the
other clubs will take notice and increase their participation. A good thing
for radiosport.

·       There are no other large *SQP *that have no conflicts with existing
5M contests and that occur after the start of next season (July 1) and
before the end of this year.

If this new 5M contest gets significant PVRC participation, then other
state QSO parties (with out-of-state club competitions and no conflict with
existing 5M contests) may be considered for our 5M calendar.

If you have a ‘favorite’ state QSO party and it does not now have a club
competition, now is not too early for you to try to convince the contest
sponsors to publish the ranked results of clubs participating in their
Party. Creating a club competition would likely increase the number of
submitted logs by a noticeable amount. The more requests that the sponsors
receive, the more likely that a club competition may be implemented.

73, Doug Hart,  AA3S

PVRC President

[ <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_-8992420301102676524__ftnref1>