OM3KHE (well, OM50KHE at the moment) recorded our 904km SSB QSO with them, and put the MP3 on their website. Thank you, guys, and see you again in September!

I added some pictures of July contest, mainly of our new caravan trailer, and the replaced 2m diameter dish for 23cm and 13cm.

The german June contest results have been published. We achieved 3rd places on 23cm and 13cm behind DM7A and DL0GTH, and a 5th place on 3cm. Not bad! In the german contest trophy, we strengthened our 4th place behind DL0GTH, DM7A and DF0MTL.

Well - a nice contest! We managed to replace the broken parts of the 23/13cm system that was destroyed after June contest, and all worked well on that bands. The biggest problem was a faulty FT290 transceiver used on 3cm: It blew the fuse as soon as we connected it to the power supply. At least one capacitor was burnt. We had to replace it with a FT790 and use another 50m of coax to bring the power down to a level suitable to drive the transverter. On the other hand, that did not really help on RX.

After a stormy friday, the weekend was nice with much sun, except for the very last 10 minutes while packing up things on sunday evening, when we got really wet. Bad luck! Beside that, we used our new caravan trailer for the first time, and had to set up some initial things there. But it is really nice and a little bit bigger than the old one, and we can enjoy proper operating positions on the microwave bands now, and nice power and ethernet cabling through the trailer.

Again, we suffered from a little too low number of operators, so the microwave bands suffered a little bit from that. Conditions seemed fine especially to the east, we never worked so many OM stations on 2m with decent signals on SSB, and we also never managed to work 7 S5-stations before. Altogether, that lead to a new record average-points-per-QSO ratio of 358km per QSO. On 13cm, we could push our all-time ODX from 751km (OE3XXA in June contest) to 820km (OM5M with an impressive 4-band-QSO 2m-13cm). As always in July, the number of participants from G, OZ, HB and OK was way above average, while the number of DL-stations was down from other events.

See all the details here.

After buying a new 2m dish after the June accident and wiring everything together, we are QRV in July contest as usual:

• 2m: 4×9el, 750w, around 44.182MHz
• 70cm: 8×11el, 600w
• 23cm: 2m dish, 200w
• 13cm: 2m dish, 30w
• 3cm: 70cm dish, 10w