World Radiosport Team Championship

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The World Radiosport Team Championship is an amateur radio contest. WRTC is an invitation-only event in which the world's elite contesters compete against one another using amateur radio stations that are in one geographic area of the world and are equipped with similar antennas and operating restrictions. Each WRTC event is organized by a standing committee of internationally recognized contesters and a host organization in the locality where the competition will be held. WRTC is the closest thing to a world championships in the sport of contesting.

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[edit] History

WRTC 1996 was held in San Francisco, California, USA.
WRTC 1996 was held in San Francisco, California, USA.
WRTC 2000 was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
WRTC 2000 was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
WRTC 2002 was held in Helsinki, Finland.
WRTC 2002 was held in Helsinki, Finland.

The first World Radiosport Team Championship event was held in July, 1990 in Seattle, Washington, USA and was timed to coincide with the Goodwill Games being held that summer in the same city. Teams of two competitors each operated in a unique, one-time contest, created specifically to coincide with WRTC. All of the stations used by the WRTC teams were located at existing amateur radio stations in the Seattle area, but not all of the stations were in equally advantageous locations, and some had more desirable call signs than others. Twenty-two teams of two operators each represented Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia. For some competitors, it was their first trip to a nation outside of the Eastern Bloc. In addition to the two team members, a referee was present at each station to monitor compliance with the WRTC rules. First place went to the team of John Dorr K1AR and Doug Grant K1DG of the United States, second place to the team of Mike Wetzel W9RE and Chip Margelli K7JA of the United States, and third place went to Jeff Steinman KRØY and Bob Shohet KQ2M of the United States.

The next WRTC event was held in the San Francisco, California, USA area in July, 1996, and was organized by the Northern California Contest Club. The format continued to be teams of two competitors each, operating at stations with similar antenna and power restrictions, participating in the IARU HF World Championship, a world-wide operating event that includes both phone and CW operation. A major innovation at WRTC 1996 was the assignment of special-event call signs to each of the competitive stations. The call signs were assigned randomly to each team, and helped prevent other stations in the IARU HF World Championship contest from recognizing their friends. The special call signs also ensured that all stations had call signs that took approximately the same amount of time to speak phonetically or to send in Morse code. Fifty-two teams of two operators each represented twenty-four countries and all six inhabited continents. First place went to the team of Jeff Steinman KRØY and Dan Street K1TO of the United States, second place to the team of John Laney III K4BAI and Bill Fisher KM9P of the United States, and third place went to the team of Dave Hachadorian K6LL and Steve London N2IC of the United States.

WRTC 2000 was held in July in the European nation of Slovenia. While the event headquarters were in the resort city of Bled, the competitive stations were spread throughout the country. Most competitors arriving in Slovenia were greeted by ceremonial military escort and the nation's top political figures were in attendance at the opening and closing ceremonies. A new innovation to the competition was the inclusion of a "pile-up" competition, in which individual competitors listened to a recording of overlapping call signs sent in Morse code and attempted to accurately identify and record as many as possible. WRTC 2000 was also the first event where all stations were equipped with antennas of identical manufacture installed at identical heights above ground. Fifty-three teams of two operators each represented twenty-five nations. First place went to the team of Jeff Steinman N5TJ and Dan Street K1TO of the United States, second place to the team of Igor Booklan RA3AUU and Andrei Karpov RV1AW of Russia, and third place went to the team of Norman Grant K1DG and John Dorr K1AR of the United States.

Champions of WRTC 2002Photo by R. A. Wilson, N6TV
Champions of WRTC 2002
Photo by R. A. Wilson, N6TV

WRTC 2002 was held in July in Helsinki, Finland. A major innovation in Finland was a near-real-time scoreboard publish on a web site during the event. On-site referees at each WRTC competition station used cellular phones to send their station's running contact totals and score to a central database each hour. The scores were published during the event on a web site that listed only the call signs of the operators at each site, not the randomly-assigned special-event call sign being used on the air. Fifty-two teams of two operators each represented twenty-eight countries. First place went to the team of Jeff Steinman N5TJ and Dan Street K1TO of the United States, second place to the team of Igor Booklan RA3AUU and Andrei Karpov RV1AW of Russia, and third place went to the team of Frank Grossmann DL2CC and Bernd Och DL6FBL of Germany.

Participants before the official opening of the WRTC2002
Participants before the official opening of the WRTC2002

WRTC 2006 was held in Florianópolis, Brazil, and introduced a sophisticated qualification scoring system for potential competitors. 47 teams were selected for the event, but only 46 actually participated. Brazilian airline Varig declared bankruptcy on June 26, causing severe travel difficulties for many teams traveling to Florianópolis the following week, and the Czech team was unable to make other travel arrangements in time. Teams were provided with larger antennas and 700 watt amplifiers in 2006, to help compensate for the greater distance from Brazil to the main centers of contesting activity in Europe and North America. Despite taking place during the solar minimum, the contest coincided with a short spike in conditions on the HF bands allowing high scores. After winning three WRTCs in a row, Jeff Steinman N5TJ and Dan Street K1TO did not compete in the 2006 event. First place went to John Sluymer VE3EJ and James Roberts VE7ZO of Canada, the first time a team from outside the United States had won the WRTC competition. Dan Craig N6MJ and Dave Mueller N2NL of the United States achieved second place, and third place went to Doug Grant K1DG and Andy Blank N2NT of the United States. Rank Boca YT6A and Djurica Maletin YT6T of Montenegro had been in third place in preliminary results, but after a scoring adjudication that removed "unique" contacts from WRTC logs, were rescored into eleventh place.

It has been announced by the WRTC Sanctioning Committee that WRTC 2010 will be held in Russia.[1]

[edit] Competition

The process of selection and invitation to compete in the World Radiosport Team Championship has varied with each event. In some years, the selection has been entirely at the discretion of the organizing committee, which has generally relied upon the past contest results of individuals who have applied for inclusion in the competition to make their decisions. In other years, selection has been delegated to national radio societies or major contest clubs, which have voted on the contesters that they wanted to represent them. The selection process is generally structured to ensure a certain number of contesters from each part of the world and a certain number from specific countries will be invited to the competition. Participants selected to compete in WRTC are generally not sponsored and must pay their own travel and lodging expenses in order to attend.

Each team of two contesters participates in the IARU HF World Championship radio contest, held on the second full weekend of July. A random draw is done to assign each team to a particular station, referee, and call sign. Teams are generally allowed to bring their own transceivers, headphones, microphones, telegraph keys, and contest logging software, but are required to use the antennas provided for them at their assigned station. In addition to respecting the rules of the IARU HF World Championship contest, WRTC teams might have additional operating restrictions. Historically, the scoring formula used for WRTC stations has not always been the same as the scoring formula used for the IARU HF World Championship. On-site referees are present to ensure compliance with the WRTC competition rules. Many WRTC site referees are former WRTC competitors.

[edit] Official WRTC web sites

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ World Radiosport Team Championship. Official web site. Retrieved Dec. 29, 2006.