30 Ham Radio Contest Tips -- Participate on a contesting team

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities.Today’s tip: Participate on a contesting team.One of the great things about some contests is having a "team" category. The idea is that a group of people can get together and form a contesting "team" and have each of their scores contribute to an overall team score for the contest.This is differentiated from a club score because the team size is usually much less than the entire club effort and from a multi category in that each operator is operating as a single operator during the contest.But, the overall score goes to a team.The advantages of signing up for a team are pretty interesting:

• Your commitment to the contest increases. Because you are part of a team, you will spend more time in the contest.
• Your competitive nature will increase the score. Who wants to have the lowest score on the team?
• You will focus more on the score. Capture those elusive multipliers. Look for weird openings during the contest. Really up your contesting game.
• Have more fun. Teams often will instant message back and forth on how they are doing in the contest, keeping up the interest and the fun.

Besides, you can usually make up your own team name. There are some pretty interesting ones out there...Scot, K9JY