Welcome to the VHF Contest Rules for 2023. Once again, we have not made major changes to the rules this year, but rather we have tweaked rules here and there. In particular we hope to encourage more entrants to come on in the weekend events by making the VHF Championship more accessible to smaller stations, making inter-UK QSOs more valuable in the 23cm and 13cm Trophies and reducing the hurdles to enter VHF NFD. You'll also see more promotion of weekend events throughout the year.

Specific changes are

We have added an option for entrants to the Wednesday evening FT8 Activity contests to enter the full 4 hours of the European event if they choose to do so, but we have also retained our existing and popular 2 hour contests.

In order to start to thin our weekend contest calendar and to try and concentrate activity a little better, we will not run the Spring 4m and 6m contests, nor the 4m Cumulatives this year.

We have added a 500 point bonus per large locator square worked in the 23cm and 13cm Trophy contests. This aims to encourage stations to look in all directions and to make shorter distance inter-UK QSOs (where activity has traditionally been thin) more valuable.

Most of our 24 hour weekend contests also contain a 6 hour section where stations can choose to operate for a shorter period -. But - in order to try and concentrate activity, for those with flexibility, we have also suggested some operating slots for 6 hour entrants. Following feedback from portable stations, we have moved these to a single suggested slot of 1400 - 2000 - the first 6 hours of the contest. Note - this is a purely optional suggestion and you are welcome to operate any 6 hours of the contest in as many slots as you like provided there is at least 1 hour of off-time between them.

The VHF Championship consists of 11 contests in total, and it can be very difficult for a station to make all of these events - or indeed to have equipment for all bands. Therefore, for the individual section of the Championship, we will only count the top 7 scores this year.

We have also changed the scoring system in the VHF Championship to be normalised using the square root of the actual score. This will make the Championship less dominated by stations making big scores in a smaller number of contests and will tend to reward stations who take part in more events. We hope this will also allow stations further down the table to contribute more effectively to their club Championship scores.

We have plans to once again enable automated entry into the co-ordinated IARU contests this year

We no longer require pre-registration of entries for VHF NFD and will extend the setup period to 48 hours

We made a small change to General rule 4j from 'All information must be copied and confirmed at the time of the QSO, over the air and only on the band in use" to 'All information must be copied and confirmed during the contest period, over the air and only on the band in use'. This makes it clear that it is permissible to correct / complete data on-air later in the contest.

We have removed the rule which stops stations changing club in the UKACs after the first 6 months and stations can now change clubs one per year. However, in exceptional circumstances, we may choose to not allow a club change if we believe it is for the purposes of artificially manipulating the overall club results

We have added a single Overseas section to the 4m Trophy (to bring it in-line with the 6m Trophy).

The 4th Backpacker contest has been moved back to its correct date co-ordinated with the 144 MHz Low Power contest.

 Norfolk now has a postcode abbreviation of NK (the same as used at HF)

The e-mail address required alongside an entry should be one which the entrant monitors, and should the adjudicator attempt to contact the entrant, but does not receive a response, the entry will become a checklog.