Ouch. To be at home at 1700 local for the Germany-vs-Argentinia football match, we will start setting up the first antennas on friday rather early this time. When operating all our 5 bands in a contest, we have to set up the first stuff on friday to get everything up on time on saturday (we drive home again on friday evening and return to the site on saturday). Normally we meet at 1400 local on friday, but this time we will start before 1100 local to be finished with our preparatory work before the match starts. Strange world :-)

After inspecting the different candidates for our new 2m antennas, we decided to stick to Tonna, but replace the portable version of the 9el with the more robust non-portable version. Our yagis served us very well for so many years that we feel that Tonna is providing good value for our money in the future, too. We will start using the new antennas in september contest.

G4LOH reports about a new 144MHz sporadic-E world record of 4293,6km between EA8AVI (IL28) and YO4FNG (KN44), and YO4FNG is claiming that QSO himself, too. That is beating the 1989 record of OE1SSB and RI8TA. While not exactly being related with contesting, i found that remarkable enough to publish it here.

After using Tonna’s portable version of the 9 element yagi on 2m for some years now, we realized that these antennas are suffering from permanent assembly and disassembly. We are going to use the upcoming HAM RADIO fair in Friedrichshafen to buy 4 new comparable yagis to replace the old ones. We are still not decided if we prefer 9el Tonna (non-portable), or the 7el WiMo DK7ZB-Design, or the 7el from DX-SR. It will mostly depend on the mechanical stability, as the dimensions and the gain of the antenna models in question are very similar. This decision will not be easy :-).

DARC published the results of May 2006 contest: We could reach a nice 3rd place on 70cm, while the other bands were not that successful, partly due to the problems with 23cm.

We included a new feature on this site: Receive an email when there are changes to this site. Your email address will only be used for notifications about changes on this site, nothing else. Also some minor changes to the menu on the right happened.

I finally catched up with my duties and published our claims of June microwave contest. This time we did not take any pictures, sorry.

Finally, i uploaded our claims and pictures of the May 2006 contest. The official German results are due to be published in some days.

I played around with some pictures i took from a tripod during May 2006 contest, and threw them together in photoshop. I selected “teamwork” as a name, as it shows that the effort DR5A puts into contesting would be impossible without that good and experienced team behind that callsign.

Nearly one month after the May contest, our report and pictures are still missing here. Other tasks kept me from working on this site. In the very near future, this site will move (again) to another new, faster server. As soon as this is done, work on this site will continue as usual. I will provide the May contest information and certainly also all bits about our June microwave contest.