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"As one of the leading contest clubs, I believe we have a responsibility to support the contest community at large, and promote our sport and Amateur Radio in general," said PVRC President Ken Claerbout K4ZW, who announced the initiatve to his membership May 10.
Claerbout will take the lead on the effort, reviewing his recent trip to EY8 in mid-June.
"We are working on a few more presentations and will send out a notice once those are scheduled," said Claerbout.
Here is the initial PVRC webinar schedule:
"I'm doing the EY8 thing twice to give me a little more practice before we go with other presenters," Claerbout told radio-sport.net last week.
The PVRC will not charge for any of these on line presentations, making it open to anyone in the ham radio community worldwide.
"All you have to do is click on the invite link then sit back and enjoy the show," said Claerbout.
"The plan is to host one Webinar a month but with the wealth of topics available, we might decide to increase their frequency," said Claerbout.
"This is a tool that can be used to extend coverage of contest topics to a much broader audience."
To Register for any of these presentations, please go to http://www.pvrc.org/webinar/webinars.htm
Each event will be recorded and available for playback at a later date. A two page Attendee Quick Reference Guide is posted at http://www.pvrc.org/webinar/quick_ref.pdf.
Each Webinar session will be established 15 minutes prior to the scheduled time in order to allow attendees to become familiar with the application. You will be prompted to load an attendee application. Questions can be directed to PVRC President Ken Claerbout at k4zw(at)comcast(dot)net
"It is our intention to dramatically reduce the time frame for producing results that are available to all participants," wrote Sweepstakes Contest Manager Ken Adams K5KA.
"The contesting community at large has requested results be made available more quickly," Adams wrote in last weeks ARRL Contest Update.
"First, the log submission deadline will be reduced from thirty to fifteen days," Adams added, who said the plan is to make the basic results available on the web 60 days after the contest is over.
"If this effort proves successful, we plan to shorten this window to 30 days in 2010," he added.
The full writeup on the Sweepstakes tests would "still appear in QST and on the Web at a later time," said Adams.
Adams also publicly urged those who still send in paper logs to start generating Cabrillo logs in the future to speed up the scoring process.
"I am asking that every club have a special project and meeting this year to insure that 100% of their members submit Cabrillo logs for SS."
Adams said over 300 paper logs were received for the 2008 contests.
The changes would put the Sweepstakes well ahead of most contests when it comes to the issuance of final scores and short log deadlines.
The most well known short deadline is in the Sprint contests, which typically have a seven day log submission.
Major contests like CQ WPX have a deadline of just over 30 days; CQ WW typically has between a 35 and 45 day log submission window, depending on the mode.
"It will be interesting to watch how it works out and what impact it has on the number of logs submitted," said WPX Director Randy Thompson K5ZD.
"I like the concept of producing the results faster in exchange for people getting their logs in sooner. With computer logs, there is very little reason it should take more than a few days (or a week) to produce the Cabrillo file and email it off to the robot."
