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Potomac Valley Radio Club

The mission of the Potomac Valley Radio Club is to promote excellence in radiosport by:

  • Competing and winning in club competition
  • Stimulating the development of operating and technical skills
  • Sharing information and knowledge
  • Attracting, mentoring and supporting new contesters
  • Developing a spirit of camaraderie and fun




5M Contest Calendar
                   

This document may have value as a template for things to consider when adding any contest to the 5M Program

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].

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 SQPs 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

[1] The existing 5M contest “NAQP” (6 events per calendar year) had been for many years a popular club competition between PVRC and a handful of major contest clubs because we, not the sponsor (NCJ), scored the club results ourselves. When this popular contest series lost all its volunteer scoring manpower, then PVRC Officers determined that it could continue as a 5M Contest only if the online scoreboard (https://contestonlinescore.com) were used as the official adjudicator of club rankings since it required no scoring calculation effort by anyone outside of the online scoreboard sponsor. This NAQP club competition sponsored by PVRC has become even more popular among PVRCers and has caused much serious competition among contest clubs (although we continue to win! So far).