First of all, this is post #100 on this page. I am very happy we made it that far, are attracting around 100 different viewers each day and there is no signs of it coming to an end. More contest participations of DR5A and more posts will follow :-).

For the upcoming september contest, we will again go up one notch higher than in July: This time we will combine our usual 4×9el vertically stacked yagi system with a second system of 4 vertically stacked BigWheel antennas, giving our positive July-experience with 2 BigWheels a 3dB boost :-). We hope to have much fun with that new system.

And finally, a nice surprise: According to the German DARC club journal “CQ-DL”, in June contest we made the best DX of all DL stations that sent in their log on 3cm: 617km with OE5VRL, followed by DM7A with a 610km QSO, and on 3rd place again us with 604km to OK1KJB. That was quite unexpected, as we do not feel we have a very good QTH for 3cm work. But when the clouds for RS are right, it just works :-).

I just updated the underlying wordpress-installation to the newest version 2.6. That was quite a big and delicate task, but everything seems to work alright. If you notice anything unusual or something that does not work as expected, please let me know, thank you.

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

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

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.

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.

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
  

While i am still waiting for our logs of that event, i already uploaded some pictures of the October 2006 UHF & Microwave Contest. Please check back regularly into that album, as more pictures will be added shortly.

Slowly catching up with this years contests, i now added some more fotos of May contest 2006 to our gallery. Enjoy!

(Finally) I added some of my pictures of our snowy March contest to our gallery. Enjoy!
And yes, soon i will upload pictures of May, June, July and even September :-).