[ARDF] Fun and Frustration

[Marvin Johnston]

Charles, your comment about doing things differently is something I 
fully agree with! The problem is what to do next. And that is why I 
started this thread.

Joe, April, and I have been putting on regular hunts for a number of 
years. We started to get a bit more attendance by putting on the antenna 
workshops. But I would like to get to the point where we have enough 
people that we will need to do the events through LAOC (I'm the contact 
for Radio Orienteering.)

So how do we do that? To start out, it would be a good thing to ask 
people why they don't try it. Lack of time is merely an excuse to 
deflect the real answer, but I don't know what that real answer is. This 
is a LOT like sales, and I don't know about anyone else on this list, 
but I certainly am not trained in sales. But I'm learning :).

My current thinking is to put up an ARDF site dedicated to ARDF 
training. It would provide audio, video, and "textbook" training and 
serve as a resource for others to get involved. Getting such a site to 
rank on the first page of Google would be a no-brainer.

It is trivial to add a forum to the site (takes maybe 5 minutes to 
install and another hour to setup.) But I don't know if it would provide 
more value than the current listservers.

I'd like to see interviews with members of the US ARDF team that would 
probably be oriented towards the experience of ARDF as opposed to 
techniques.

And adding interviews from people we know from other countries would 
also provide some perspective that this is an international sport.

Right now, I'm asking experts in the field of Internet Marketing how 
they would proceed. One of the first responses I got was to have a 
*great* story that will pull people in.

The story might be along the lines of describing a downed aircraft, the 
search to find it, and where some lives were saved thanks to the RDF 
skills of the searchers. And then expand it to show where the skills 
learned with ARDF would be very helpful in the above situation.

There are lots of things we can do, but we need to start doing them! I 
expect to have such a site live in the next day or so.

Marvin, KE6HTS




Charles Scharlau wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Marvin Johnston <marvin at west.net 
> I think we may have to deal with the reality that ARDF, like 
> orienteering, is a niche sport, and is likely to remain that way. The 
> only thing that might change that would be an evolution of the sport 
> into something that it currently is not.
> 
> 
>     While I am certainly in favor of developing/obtaining good
>     equipment, I'm not so certain that the lack of good equipment is
>     hindering the growth of ARDF.
> 
>     My suspicion is that relatively few people are willing to dedicate
>     regular time to promoting ARDF, and that is the real problem. Anyone
>     disagree?
> 
>     And if this is the problem, what is needed to get more people to
>     devote time to promoting ARDF?
> 
> I respectfully disagree. Would more promotion help? It could help bring 
> orienteering retention closer to that of orienteering, perhaps, but 
> always with the handicap of additional technical hurdles inherent to 
> ARDF. I don't see there being some mystical threshold of promotion that 
> once attained will unleash a flood of new participants who have been 
> searching for this activity. I think we (or at least I) need to try 
> something different.