To give our signals on 23 and 13cm some more punch, we will use a new dish starting October 2006, going from 1.2m diameter to a whopping 2m. The below picture shows that new monster beside his proud owner Alfred, DK3OS, during the first assembly. We are very excited about that new toy and are curious what we can achieve with it in the October UHF/SHF/Microwave-Contest.
I made the following little updates to the site:
Gradually, i will go back and add all the results of previous year back to 1998 when the group started “serious” operation.
The (german) results of the June microwave contest have been published. The intermediate results of the german contest trophy can be found there, too. I also updated our 2006 results page according to that.
The boys of OM3KHE again took an audio clip of us working them over a distance of 904km. Thank you very much, and we hope to get another one in September :->. Beside that, they also have other audio and video clips on their site.
Finally, i found a small problem on the site that prevented the archive links from working. Now the archive is working like it should. Beside that, i also added an enhanced page navigation at the bottom. Have fun.
Our July contest report can be found here.
This contest was very hot and very sunny, so it was quite a challenge to escape the mosquitos and the flies on the one hand, and the sunburn on the other. We put up the 2m and 3cm antennas up early on friday to be back home for the DL-LU football match at 1700 local. On saturday we continued in the burning sun and only had a minor hassle with our PR-transceiver before the contest started. The bigger task was to keep all those flies out of our caravan, but we succeeded. But shortly into the contest we discovered two more problems: The 2m rotator controller turned the antenna, but the needle was stuck and wont move, and 23cm felt deaf, although we successfully listened to the GB3USK beacon from IO81 (over 630km) before the contest. So we took down the 23/13cm antenna again and changed the 23cm coax cable, eliminating the problem. On 2m, we measured the voltage from the rotator with a meter and made a table of “QTF vs voltage”, so that we could read where the antenna was pointing. Luckily, DK3OS brought a new controller unit on sunday morning. Beside that, everything went smooth in this hot-summer-contest. The results were quite satisfying, although not fantastic. We could not take advantage of the sea path tropo that developed over north- and baltic sea, but we could work GM0ONN/P IO86RW 922km for our 2nd best 70cm QSO ever. Activity from G and OK was nice, also from SP with 9 QSOs on 2m this time.
Pictures are about to come in the next days.
