Northern Lights Radio Society
RoverMania Promotion
How does the Northern Lights Radio Society promote RoverMania?
- Ever since we coined the name RoverMania, we have been talking about the contest to anyone who
will listen!
- For RoverMania I in 2004, the NLRS President, WØZQ, made a concerted effort to contact
local UHF afficionados who had been out in rover mode in the past, and solicited their
participation in that year's contest. Another club member, NØHJZ, compiled information about
the stations that planned to rove, into an Excel spreadsheet.
- Because of the success of RoverMania I, the NLRS sent an open letter to 27 affiliated ARRL
clubs who submitted club aggregate scores in 2004, soliciting their participation in RoverMania II
in 2005.
- Via the club mail reflector, we traded ideas about locations that rovers had found to be good in
their prior outings, selected a rover-specific calling/operating frequency for each station (away
from the x.100 SSB/CW calling frequency, but not too far), selected grids to activate, and made
estimates of when each station would be in what grid, so others could productively look for them
in the right direction at the right time.
- We published this sort of information on the NLRS web site, so it would be widely accessible prior
to the start of the contest. We solicited updates and corrections, via the email reflector, up
until the start of the contest. At that point, the web pages were "frozen", to avoid any conflict
with the contest rules' prohibition of internet-based "spotting".
- Each year, we try to improve the extent of the planning data published on the web. In 2004
(RoverMania I), we published a list of the rovers, the bands they planned to use, the grids they
planned to activate, and the times they expected to be operational in each grid visited. We also
published maps showing where these various grids are located, for the benefit of those who needed
some help visualizing what direction they would need to point to reach each of them, and the
approximate distance from the Twin Cities metropolitan area. In 2005 (RoverMania II), we made plans
to also publish similar information for fixed stations in the upper Midwest who planned to operate,
but that failed to come together in time, probably because our webmaster was distracted by his plans
to participate in a multi-op station on the top of a nearby ski hill, as orchestrated by NØHJZ.
In 2005, we also started the process of turning the rover station information into a database-driven
system instead of manually-coded HTML. In 2006 (RoverMania III), we managed to add in the fixed
station information that we failed to include in the prior year. Here are links to the RoverMania
planning pages on the NLRS web site:
- In 2007 (RoverMania IV), the NLRS began to sponsor awards for a new category of operation, the
Limited Rover, so that stations with no more than 3 UHF bands can compete in a separate category
and have a meaningful chance at being acknowledged for their efforts. Here is a link to the Rules
for the
The Limited Rover Award.
Last edited 2009-07-03
Please send your comments and suggestions for these pages to:
the NLRS Webmaster: John, WØJT
