I don’t normally read contest reports for two reasons. First, because the report is written by someone who is often in the middle of contest afterglow, the author will use his narrative to tell a story about an event that is much larger than what their particular story will tell. The second reason is that sometimes it is very obvious that the person asked to write the report isn’t a writer at all and as much as they slogged through the writing of it will be the same amount of slogging you’ll have to do to read it. I see the dilemma- without contest reports, the magazines can’t have advertisers and so on. Of course, the internet has taken a lot of the timeliness out of the publications business and so what people really seem to want from their publications is a list of who won what and how. More a blow by blow sort of writing that you would find, I’m guessing here since I don’t read it, in the sports section of the newspaper.
However, I just stumbled upon K1RA’s writeup of the June 2012 VHF contest about his group K8GP, The Grid Pirates. Go see for yourself. I especially enjoyed which can only be described as a holistic approach to a contest report- I got some stories about the people involved, what their goals were and how they ended up. Sure, it’s a longer read, but the quality justifies the length.
Well done!