BCC Man of the Year 2011: DL6MHW

Im Rahmen des BCC-Buffet am Samstag Abend (25.6.2011) wurde auch dieses Jahr wieder ein BCC-Mitglieder für seine Aktivitäten und sein Engagement besonders gewürdigt. Unser Präsident Ben, DL6RAI ehrte Micha, DL6MHW als „BCC-Man of the Year 2011“. Die Laudatio kann hier nachgelesen werden:

Ladies and Gentlemen, this year I am very proud to honor a member of our club, who has contributed not only to Contesting and DXing for the last 31 years, but also to amateur radio in general.

His contribution does not show in large personal scores or at the top list of contest results. He is one of the guys who makes many things happen in the background. He specialises in cutting the red tape in projects and organisations. And by that he is creating the playground and implementing technology for all of us. In modern vocabulary you would call him a key enabler.

Starting with amateur radio in the early 80s, actually the same year I got my ticket, his callsign started to show up in Contest Results only in the mid-90s. Probably initiated by joining the DA0HQ activities in 1996, he got bitten by the contest bug.

His adversion to bueraucracy and administrative burdens motivates him to automate mechanical activities wherever it makes sense. And so his first project visible to the contest community was providing a contest robot for the DARC, a piece of software that would automatically receive E-mail log submissions, create a quality report and return a confirmation to the entrant making him aware of omissions, formatting problems etc. This allowed DARC contest managers to concentrate more on checking logs rather than having to fiddle around with hundreds if not thousands of E-Mails.

Being the creative person he is, showed when he came up with the idea to provide a database for awards and certificates by collecting verified contest QSOs in a single database and making them available to award managers. Similar to ARRL’s LoTW (which by the way also began to take shape in 2001), this saved people interested in awards from QSL paperwork and at the same time motivated people to join contests in order to have their log data available on-line. Unfortunately, it took our national society almost ten years to realize the benefits of the DARC Contest Logbook. Today it is an established service of DARC and is in use for many awards.

Following his idea, never giving up over all those years, being refused by the organisation, becoming frustrated but still moving forward – these are the qualities of a long-distance runner. No wonder, that the second hobby of this guy is jogging and joining marathon runs.

This guy is one of the most creative persons I know. He has been working with the DARC Contest Committee for more than 13 years. He realized automated scoring for our national club competition, he created PDF awards for contest participants to download; and his final job was helping to organise radio operation activities around the Women’s World Football Cahmpionship just going on.

Being a university professor in real life, he also quickly recognized the potential of the Contest University concept that was started in the US in 2007. Again it was his stamina, his endurance and his background work that made last year’s first and very sucessful German Contest University possible. And again, in 2011, he came back to Friedrichshafen to make CTU 2011 happen.

Personally, he always enjoys experimenting with antennas and new technology. He was one of the first to try out Skimmer here in Germany. He is the president of his local DARC chapter and he has the support of his family while being on expedition to places like Syria, Scotland, Denmark and the Canary Islands.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me call on the stage:

Michael Höding, DL6MHW

Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

In den vergangenen Jahren wurden bereits folgende BCC-Mitglieder mit diesem Titel ausgezeichnet:
DF4RD (2002), DL2NBU (2003), DJ9MH (2004), DK2OY (2005), DL6RAI (2006), DL8OH (2007), F5MZN (2008), DL3DXX (2009) und DL8WPX (2010).