This year, we started into October contest with low expectations: Weather forecast was terrible. But finally, we got away in a relatively nice way: Setting up all the antennas was all completed in time during a windy and rather cold saturday morning and early afternoon, but with many sunny intervals and just little rain. Setting up the new UMTS-data-connection via an USB-stick proved to be more difficult than expected, and so finally some minutes before the start of the contest we fell back to our old method of using a USB-connected mobile phone instead of the stick.

70cms had a furious start with good first 2 hours, but then slowed down. 23cms on the other had suffered from a 6db attenuation at the TRX that went unnoticed until about 2h into the contest, with many missed skeds sent up from 70cms. After we found that little nasty switch, 23cms gained momentum and brought better results (obviously!). The wind increased up to gale force during the evening, and heavy rain set in, too….Luckily we could stay in our caravan. After a night break, the morning shift found the 23cm antenna in the mist slightly leaning to the side due to strong winds, and had to fix that first before continuing with the operation. 23cms had a nice start in the morning with IZ4BEH and I4LCK/4 again easily worked (great job guys, why didn’t we try that earlier? :-).

But shortly after that, when QSOing a DL, Murphy wanted to make his QSO with us, and the TS850 used to drive the transverter started smoking and smelling. We disconnected it immediately, plugged it back in afterwards and found the RX ok, but the TX not working. Repairing was impossible on-site, and the only other HF-transceiver suitable for driving a transverter was in use on 70cms. To be able to continue with 23cms we had two options: taking the 23cm tower down in heavy rain and gale, opening the box behind the dish in that rain and trying to disconnect the transverter in that box to drive the amplifier with a regular 23cm transceiver from our caravan, with added problems to determine the right power to drive everything, and then putting everything back up, or to use our 13cm-driving TS790 TRX on 70cm without the in-caravan transverter, and using the 70cm TS850 on 23cm…Due to technical and weather reasons, we opted for the second, and started to replug everything to use the TS790 at our 70cm operating position. As expected, there were some problems like non-matching PTT cables, unsuited power levels to drive the amplifier, and so on…so some soldering and work had to be done until everything was working again. After a break of roughly 2 hours 70cm and 23cm were QRV again while 13cm went QRT.

On 70cm, the worse quality of the TS790 on TX and RX compared to a TS850+transverter was obvious, but we could keep going, and finished the contest with satisfying result given the circumstances. We noticed a very low number of G-stns on 70cm, and even the number of OKs was unexpectedly low. On 23cm, keeping that band QRV really payed out well: Despite bad rain and wind we could add some nice QSOs with OK2, OM, G and OZ to our log giving the score a nice boost. We ended on that band with the second-best score ever after last years extraordinary nice conditions, even with 2 hours auf 6dB attenuation and 2 hours of changing transceivers. ODX on 23cm was even better than on 70cm.

13cm surely was below expectations due to going QRT on sunday morning and some missed skeds in the very beginning of the contest. 3cm had some rain scatter, but as there was rain all around us, we could not use it effectively for DX-QSOs.

Luckily, half an hour before the end of the contest the rain stopped, and the free operators started taking down 3cm early to use the dry period. We could even get the other antennas down in no or just little rain but strong wind. But at the very end, when we had to push the caravan trailer out of the soft ground to reach the road, we experienced very heavy rain and all got soaking wet…we missed a dry departure from the contest site by only 15 minutes.

See all the details here.