Monday Night Net – New Policy

Announcing some changes to Essex Ham’s Monday Night Net, which will take effect from the 1st of April 2018.

Hopefully, everyone enjoyed this year’s little April Fool’s joke. Thanks for playing along!

Following on from a successful trial last week, we’ll be starting to use an automated rotation system – this is to address a number of problems, such as: delays between rounds on a busy net and excessive ‘overs’ (timeouts). We’re also adding a few new features to spice up the net.

New Rotation Pattern:

From Monday’s net, a rotation list will appear alongside the chatroom box on the site. This means you’ll be able to chat online between overs (as many of you do now), and see the rotation.

You’ll be able to see when your turn’s coming up, and just like on Facebook, be able to “like” someone’s last over. The new rotation software also knocks off points for hitting the timeout, and if you exceed the two minutes (or take a ‘k’ for extra time), you’ll drop down the rotation for the next round to even up the distribution. You can also gain points for giving a helpful answer, or raising a new topic. There will also be some new features…

New Features:

For a bit of fun, there will also be some activities running alongside the net, including:

• Wordsearch – A keyword will appear in the chatroom. The first one to use it, loses a point, and the others on the net have to spot it, to get a point.
• Scrabble – The net controller will read out a letter of the alphabet at the start of each round of overs. The ham who gets the longest word using those letters at the end of each hour is rewarded
• Treasure Hunt – The net controller will sneak in the mention of an unusual radio term during one of their overs. After each hour, those in the chatroom get a point for spotting the “treasure word”
• Challenge – A keyword will appear in the chatroom at random, and the first person to use the word during their over, gets a point

It all sounds complicated, but in last week’s trial, it worked really well. Here’s a screenshot of the revised chatroom, showing the rotation, “like” buttons and position. 

Scores

Running the net will now be a two-person job – One to run the radio, and one to run the chatroom and scorecard.

We’ve had fun working out what to do with the weekly scores. They’ll be carried through week-on-week, to encourage people to take part more regularly, and there will be some ‘jokers’. Here are the ones we’ve picked so far:

• The person with the highest score by 9pm can nominate someone to read out the Net Disclaimer in an unusual style (e.g. Pirate, Cockney, high-pitched voice)
• The winning score of the night sets the ‘challenge’ for next weeks net – For example, the challenge for next week might be to identify quotes from famous movies, song titles from lyrics, characters from TV shows, etc

We hope you enjoy the changes to Essex Ham’s net, and we’d love to get your comments, in the box below!

 

Pete M0PSX