My club, the Harford County R/C Modelers in Maryland are working out the details for our first season of SSC Combat. One question is, what is a fare and resonable fee for an event and what do you expect to get or would like to get for your landing fee?

Thanks for your inputs....
Robert
http://www.hcrcm.com/

Hi robert.

Most sanctioned combat contests charge $20 entry fee. This usually includes free lunch to the pilots, which can be anything from pepperonni pizza to hamburgers, etc.

Also the contest provides the streamers. The first year we held our contest in jackson we made streamers with crepe paper bought from Hobby Lobby. Now we buy them pre-made from Mike Fredericks, as most CD's do: http://www.hattrickrc.com/streamer.html

Also there are generally trophies, plaques, or certificates for the top finishers. Last year at Jackson we put a new twist on it by also awarding additional certificates to "Rookies", pilots with fewer than 3 prior contests. ("Rookies" were also eligible for all the other plaques and prizes too.)

If your contests are santioned, you'll have to provide the streamers, and the food is pretty commonplace. I will suggest that you try to watch the trophy and other expenses. The $20/pilot goes really fast by the time you buy the sanction, food, streamers, clipboards, and anything else you might need.

If you're not sanctioning the contests, you don't really have to provide much of anything, but then I wouldn't charge $20 if I wasn't giving the pilots stuff in return.

Alex is also a little fast with the "Most" part there. Around here, it's more typical to charge $10 for a contest, and they have been all sanctioned.

Food isn't included though, and different clubs in this area deal with that differently or not at all.

So it's really up to you. Your basic costs are going to basically be the santion fee plus streamers. You can get pre-rolled streamers from Hattrick at about 50cents per streamer (including shipping if you order a good sized pile), and you want to have one streamer per pilot per round. So for a typical contest around here, it's usually 4-6 rounds per class (4 or 5 rounds if there are 2 classes being run, 6 if you're just doing SSC usually, but you could do more if you want). Anyway, 6 rounds is $3 in streamer, plus a little money for string, though that's generally a dollar for a spool that will last a while.

I've been running the contests here basically at a break-even level, which has been working for us. If you want to charge more, you can, it's up to you.

10 or 15 and the sponsoring club feeds the pilots and gets the "good" streamers.

Robert, is it correct that your club (HCRCM) and the MARKS club in Salisbury, Md., both have SSC events scheduled for Saturday, April 19?

Brian

Yeah, they pretty much created a "perfect conflict". Marks is trying to schedule 4 dates. They have 3 already sanctioned, and are looking at the 4th.

HCRCM just scheduled a bunch of events, and managed to land on ALL 3 of the Marks events, as well as the date they were thinking of for the 4th date. It sucks pretty badly for guys in this area who might want to go to try to attend events at both clubs (like me).

In the politest of terms (hey, I'm a contest director), how come District IV hasn't better coordinated this? I'm planning to fly as much SSC as I can this year. It's a pity that two series (plural) are getting going this year on the same dates so many times. We have the luxury of multievents, but are going to be limited by conflicting dates.

So which series should we support?

Back on the topic of fair and reasonable fees: Don't the pilot fees vary based on the prevailing price that cuts are going for that day?

Brian

well, as far as I can tell, the Harford County guys haven't put in sanction applications. I could be wrong on that, but I don't know. They generally seem more club-focused, and it's out of pure accident that they hit the same weekends. I don't think they really looked around to see what other clubs were doing what.