What's New

Thank you all for your consultation responses and feedback. We've analysed these carefully and are making the following changes as a result. We'll make these changes for 2025, review the impact, and if necessary, amend further or revert in 2026.  

 

·         Having tested licence class-based sections in the FM Activity Contest during 2024, we haven’t seen an increase in newcomers, so we're reverting to the previous 50W and 10W sections for the FMACs. Awards will still be available for the leading Intermediate and Foundation licensees.  

·         We've removed General Rule 2j which prevented stations from taking part in a contest under different callsigns. This means that entrants are – for example - able to spend some time at a club station and then do some operating from home, or can enter a 6 hour section twice under different callsigns if they wish. This was a rule which seemed to have more disadvantages than advantages and we hope this will maximise flexibility and activity. 

·         We are going to change the May 2m contest to be a 6 hour event on the first Sunday of a full weekend in May to co-ordinate with the European 2m contest that weekend. We hope the increased activity will create a more interesting event, and perhaps groups who would like to do a full weekend’s contesting will consider doing the 70cm Trophy on the Saturday and 2m on the Sunday.

·         The first Backpackers event will move to align with this new May 2m contest slot.

·         We are changing the scoring in the Backpackers to use bonuses rather than multipliers. This is intended to prevent runaway leaders’ scores. The Backpackers events which have currently multipliers based on Postcodes, Countries and Locators will move to a 200 point bonus for each of these, and those Backpackers events which currently have multipliers based on Locators and Countries will move to a 500 point bonus for each locator worked. 

·         We are also changing the normalisation in the Backpackers events to be position based rather than score based – again to prevent runaway leaders. Based on feedback from active entrants, we are retaining the rule that 3 from 5 events will count to the championship. 

·         We are going to change the Sweepers Section of VHF NFD into a separate full fixed station contest.  This will allow the fixed station entrants to work everyone for points, but scoring will include a 500 point bonus for working UK portable stations who enter either VHF NFD or the Backpackers events. This is intended to ensure that entrants in the fixed contest are incentivised to look hard for UK portables. The already agreed removal of General Rule 2j will allow operators to spend some time at their club VHF NFD entry and some from home if they wish. 

·         For the Open section of VHF NFD, 70cm and 23cm will remain as bands which can be operated for the full 24 hours. But for the Restricted, Low Power and Multi-Single sections, 70cm will take place from 1400 – 2200 on the Saturday, and 23cm will take place from 0800 – 1400 on the Sunday. This is intended to reduce hardware and people requirements for the smaller sections. Feedback from the survey was overwhelmingly in favour of making this change, but we’ve taken into account views from Open Section entrants who were particularly keen that 70cm and 23cm remained as 24-hour bands.

·         We are combining the Open and Single Operator Portable sections in the Low Power contests, as there were so few entries in the Open section.

·         We’ve introduced an FM Activity Contest Championship combined the scores from the 2m and 70cm FM Activity Contests for both individuals and clubs .

·         We are changing our adjudication practices to not penalise stations mixing BST and GMT times (please continue to try and log in GMT though!), and not to penalise received serial numbers which are ‘out-by-one’ since these are often sending station errors.

 

Andy G4PIQ