Tackling my ever-growing todo-list, i finally added more pictures of the September 2006 contest to the appropriate album.

The (preliminary) results of the 2004 IARU Region I VHF contest are out, processed by the OESV. We (as DL0RTA) scored a nice 15th place out of 304 multi-OP participants. Not bad.

Working down my backlog, i finally uploaded some photos of the 2006 July contest (pre-setup on friday). Enjoy.

The (german) October results are out. While DL0GTH and DM7A sported some very impressive scores, behind them the scores quickly shrunk, so that we could achieve some nice ranks although we only achieved around 1/3 of the scores of DL0GTH or DM7A.

Results of DR5A:

• 70cm: Place 5 of 58 Participants
• 23cm: Place 5 of 37 Participants
• 13cm: Place 4 of 17 Participants
• 3cm: Place 7 of 13 Participants

In the german contest trophy, we stayed on place 5 of 249 multi-op participants, but could shave off much of the gap to the 4th place, and put some more points between us and the 6th place. It is very unlikely that the top 10 will change after the evaluation of Marconi CW contest, so this will be the final result of 2006, too:

1. DL0GTH: 7847
2. DM7A: 7556
3. DF0YY: 7099
4. DF0MTL: 5791
5. DR5A: 5724
6. DL0V: 5556
7. DK0NA: 5357
8. DM0Y: 5278
9. DK0PU: 4005
10. DK0ZB: 3916

I added more Pictures of the CQWW DX SSB 2006 contest (starting on page 2 of that gallery), and i spiced up the “Where we are” page by adding a 360° panorama view of the JO30EM site. The Quicktime player is needed to explore that panorama. Enjoy.

Georg, DL1ECG, uploaded his pictures of the CQWW DX SSB contest we did with a small team using DR5A. We tried a portable setup on our VHF location JO30EM and participated in the M/S category.

Our claim from the 3830 score reflector:

CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB
Call: DR5A
Operator(s): DB9EX, DF1LON, DK2CRN, DL1ECG, DL1ELY
Station: DR5A

Class: M/S HP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:

 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:  129     6       42
   80:  334     9       61
   40:  270    22       88
   20:  717    36      125
   15:  435    33      122
   10:  194    16       82
------------------------------
Total: 2079   122      520  Total Score = 2,165,466

Club: Rhein Ruhr DX Association

Comments:

Not many of you already knew DR5A. The call is mainly used for VHF contest
operation from our portable location. After a rather successfull VHF and up
season we decided to make our first M/S entry from that location. On friday
morning we set up our small portable contest station:

Running station:
FT1000MP + AL80b
FB-33 (3ele 20m/15m/10m) 12m up
Windom (160m/80m/40) 80m long and 16m up
Vertical 40m

Multi station:
FT1000MP + Acom 1010
R7000 (40m-10m)

We are satisfied with the score compared to our small setup. What we missed
several times was a second beam for the Multi station. On day two it was very
difficult to get the rare and needed multis. Sometimes we switched the beam
from the running station to the multi station which resulted in a very loud
“ahh”: signal increased from S1 to S7 and only one call was needed to log a
certain station.
Very high local noise on 160m of S9. We could not really find the source as
there are green fields, green fields and green fields around us. But we have
some wind turbine near to us and maybe they cause that noise floor.
High band conditions on Saturday were very good and we even logged US on 10m.
On Sunday not a single US station was heard on 15m and rather low US rates even
on 20m. Very nice Sunday evening 10m opening to Zone 8, 9 and 10.

I added pages ranting about our crew, our equipment and our location on the righthand sidebar. Unfortunately, Wordpress (the underlying blog system used on this page), or more precisely the included richtext-WYSIWYG-editor decided to omit parts of the beatiful hand-crafted tables used to aggregate our results in 2005 and 2006, although i did not even save them in that editor! Grrrrrrr! I will have to rebuild them from scratch, but not today, i am really fed up…

The detailed results of 2006 are still there for your information.

After the September IARU contest, the top of the German contest trophy (multi-op section) looks like this:

1. DL0GTH: 6113
2. DM7A: 5794
3. DF0YY: 5584
4. DF0MTL: 4633
5. DR5A: 4509
6. DL0V: 4394

So we have got roughly the same distance up to DF0MTL and down to DL0V, and it is unlikely (although not impossible), that the ranking will change after October UHF contest. The Marconi contest will not change anything at all, so i looks like as if we will end up in the 5th place this year.

I am now finished with uploading pictures of the October 2006 contest, featuring many pictures of our new 2m dish for 23cm and 13cm, and some atmospheric night shoots of the full moon over the contest site. But i want to draw your attention to two pictures of a natural phenomenon that is often overlooked, but that we noticed while taking down the equipment on sunday afternoon: Sundogs (Parhelion). I heard of them, but never noticed one before. So this was a nice ending of the contest weekend.

The “additional suns” can be found as bright spots in the clouds, left and right of the man sun (which i tried to hide behind the windmill).
 

Other nice pictures:

• Sunset on sunday evening
  
• Night shots with full moon
   
• Ursa Maior over our generator trailer
  
• The shack caravan
  
• Windmill park
  

…are here. A longer report and more detailed statistics will follow soon.

EDIT: The detailed report is now online, enjoy!