There have been rumors for several years that the UHF contest is about to be abolished.  It is held only one or two weeks before the first weekend of the 10 GHz contest and a month before the September VHF contest.  Although it continues to attract more logs than the 10 GHz contest, it has been seen as the more at-risk if one contest must be cut.

I hope those rumors are not true, but if they are it has been a good run.  I was chairman of the ARRL Contest Advisory Committee in 1977 when the CAC  first proposed having a UHF contest.  I wrote the original draft of the rules, with considerable help from K1ZND, a young headquarters staffer named Dave Sumner.  (For the last 30 years Dave has been the ARRL CEO as K1ZZ.)  When the contest was launched in 1978, I mounted a serious effort with kilowatts on 220 and 432 atop Mt. Pinos--then the best accessible VHF mountaintop on the west coast.  Relying heavily on 223.5 MHz FM, I had the highest single operator score in the initial UHF contest.  The multipliers were 1 degree by 1 degree geographic units (Maindenhead grid squares had not been invented yet).  "11635" was a rare multiplier.  That was the eastern half of what is now DM15.  I worked more stations in "11834" (in L.A.--the eastern half of DM04) than in any other 1x1 square.

If I've counted correctly, 2014 was the 37th running of the UHF contest.  I made a serious effort again, this time as a rover--something else that hadn't been invented yet when the UHF contest was launched.  In fact, it wasn't at all clear back then that it was legal to count multiple contacts with someone who moved through two or more of these 1x1 grid squares--although such small geographic units cried out for roving.  At first the ruling was that the extra multipliers counted, but there were zero QSO points after the initial contact.

I hope to be on the air during the 2015 UHF contest, but if there is no 2015 UHF contest, I'll be grateful for the memories.

73, Wayne (N6NB)