This contest was a little bit below our expectations. Especially on 23cm we felt conditions to the east being rather bad. While the ODX of 853km was quite OK compared to previous contests, we missed the “flesh” below that, with some more QSOs to JN99 in the 800+ km range, as we normally have. We cannot remember to have worked more G-stations than OKs ever before. Unfortunately, the Gs can only partly make up for the loss we suffered in the east. On the other bands, results were more or less average, but with a nice number of 3cm QSOs in the absence of rain scatter, thanks to good activity. The ODX on 70cm to EA1-land was also a nice surprise, although the signal was only barely audible. Weather was rather bad with strong winds and some rain during the contest time.

See all the details here.

Bad luck for our group in this contest: A coax connector in our 4way-divider up at the antennas burnt away slowly and barely noticable until 6am UTC in the morning, when it got replaced finally. Certainly, the lost points could not be recovered during the last hours of the contest, leaving us with an unsatisfying result again. While there were nice lifted conditions with unusual QSOs to GW, GI and EI, easterly directions were disappointing. See all the details here.

Now we are looking forward to the October UHF/SHF/Microwave Contest to finish a contest season that could have been really better this time.

Interesting QSOs:
EI5FK, IO51RT, 1049km SSB, ODX
GI6ATZ, IO74AJ, 939km SSB (a bit chaotic)
YU1BAA, JN94SD, 1218km SSB, MS-Burst? - incomplete!

Again a mixed bag: Operator situation looked good for this contest, so we decided to even add a 4xBigwheel Antenna on 2m to our well-trusted 4×9el. Pre-setup on friday was handicapped by nearby thunderstorms and some heavy rain, but we used the breaks inbetween and could set up 2 antenna systems. But on saturday, we discovered two team members being ill, one leaving the QTH even before the contest started, and the second one handicapped (although he stayed till the end). This unexpected loss of labour force lead (again) to a late start on the bands, and 2m being operated on a “for fun” basis only, with looking for some DX and playing in the nice sporadic-E. Lack of operators also lead to some breaks in operating the other bands, and we did a night break. Although 23cm did not “feel” so good, in the end we got our 2nd best 23cm result ever, with a new best for “km-per-QSO” at 354km/QSO, and egalizing our old 23cm-ODX of OM6A (OM3KHE) JN99JC at 904km. Given the circumstances, 70cm and 13cm scores were OK, and on 3cm we could even enjoy some rain scatter at the very end of the contest, giving us 3 additional QSOs.

All the Details here…

This may contest was dominated by our lack of operators: While at first the situation did not look too bad (thanks to Heike, DJ8SP, returning to our group at least on friday and saturday), due to some short-term illnesses and severe back pain of DL1ECG) we were only 3 people to finish our setup on saturday, only 4 people to run 5 bands during saturday, and only 3 people during parts of sunday before finishing with 4 people for the last contest hours and taking-down. Last chunks of work have been finished by Lars, DF1LON, and me, DL1ELY, more then 4.5h after contest end. This strain also shows in our results.
The 2m band suffered most with an late start of over 2h, and a night break that easily extended into sunday morning. We only operated about 14h there, but used a second antenna (2 stacked big wheels) in parallel to our usual 4×9el. Given that, the result is quite OK (429 QSOs, 119.000 Points, ODX OM3W JN99CH, 836km).
70cm saw 19h of operating time with a night break. Here we performed quite well (313 QSOs, 94.000 Points), and bagged a nice ODX of 927km with SP2JYR in JO92, a QSO that is not quite usual. the result was nearly as good as the very satisfying one from last May, and was only surpassed by the October tests since 2005.
23cm was operated for about 17 hours, and while the conditions felt rather bad, a nice number of QSOs with G and some occasional DX to the east finally led to a very good result (117 QSOs, 35.600 Points, ODX OK2KYC JN99BM, 846km), that exceed our old best-May-result by a whopping 50%. But still, many QSOs with “regulars” to the east and Italy did not work, despite several tries.
13cm was rather disappointing (22 QSOs, 5.400 Points, ODX OE5VRL/5 JN78DK, 617km), with a low number of skeds from 23cm turned into successful 13cm QSOs. Conditions did not seem to be right.
Also 3cm suffered from the lack of operators, so it could not operated as we wished, but skeds from 23 and 13cm finally led to a satisfying result (19 QSOs, 3.400 Points, ODX DL6NAA, JO50VF, 386km) for that band in that conditions (no rain scatter). But we had wished to have more time for longer running skeds, than the result would have been even better.

We hope to be better staffed in July contest, where we will be running all 5 bands again.

Detailed statistics can be found here.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

This year, Murphy decided not to visit our equipment, but our “human resources”. Gregor, DH6JR, had to visit the hospital due to gall bladder problems on saturday, and unfortunately had to stay there. We hope he will recover soon and join our team again in October. On the hardware side, everything went smooth, and we used our two systems of 4×9el and 4x Big Wheels (vertically stacked) to fight against mediocre conditions. The final result is very similar to the two previous years with the usual bunch of DX from 9A, HA, OM, S5, GM, SP and I, but only the well-known big guns. Finally, we missed the 700-QSO-barrier only by a hair.

On the downside: only one SM station, only 4 OZ, and activity from PA and ON is on a further decline.

We recorded the whole contest, and audio snippets of the best DX QSOs will be uploaded soon.

See the details here.

EDIT: Some audio is now available.

I added new detailed statistics for the June and July contests. These were missing up to now as i had planned to work on them for quite a long time. During the next days, i will further improve and extend these statistics, and will replace the details on the older contests with this new one. The new statistics are not generated by software and pasted into the pages anymore, but dynamically taken from a database of all our contest QSOs and generated on the fly. As you can imagine, having all QSOs in a database opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the web site, including top-lists of QSOs on different bands, multi-contest statistics, a search for calls or locators in our database, and so on. I am determined to incorporate all that into the page in the near future. Stay tuned.

And while you are at it, and perhaps addicted to HF contesting, too: Give our team members DF1LON and DK2CRN a call in the upcoming IOTA-contest when they will operate CT9L from Madeira Island.

I uploaded our claimed scores here. The contest was very nice with good scores on 2m, 70cm and 23cm, but again our 13cm preamplifier broke at the very beginning, so that we could only work very local QSOs < 100km. On 2m, activity from G, OK, HB9 and OZ was great, like in other July events, too. We used a second antenna system (2x Big Wheel) with some success, and plan to enlarge that system to 4x Big Wheel in future contests. On 2m and 70cm our average points-per-QSO was the best ever, and on 23cm we could set a new high score for a July contest, while enjoying the 2nd best average points-per-QSO ever. The weather was quite fine too, making it a nice and enjoyable contest (beside for the broken 13cm preamplifier).

During June microwave contest, we also took part in the IARU-Region-I-CW-Fieldday as DR5A/p. DF1LON killed some of his free time with some enjoyable CW QSOs.

Claimed score:

Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Cty
1,8  CW      14      56    3
3,5  CW      83     274   18
  7  CW     150     447   25
 14  CW     103     320   27
 21  CW      16      52   10
 28  CW      18      54   11
Total  Both   384    1203   94

           Score : 113.082
             Rig : TS-850 100w

        Antennas : 2x20m Doppelzepp

You can find our raw numbers here. In short it was a very nice contest with a very good 23cm result, nice DX to the east, a new square IN88 on 23cm, the first QSO with Italy on 23cm, and many new bests on 13cm: Most QSOs ever, best score ever, best average ever, most squares ever, and a new All-time-ODX with OM3W JN99CH 856km, wo called us on 23cm (we worked him before) to arrange a sked for 13cm, and who appeared on 13cm after our first CQ with a real 539 on the s-meter…steady! Incredible! The previous All-time-ODX was more than 100km lower…3cm enjoyed light rainscatter on saturday with some 300km QSOs, and better rainscatter conditions on sunday with nice DX to OK and OE, but not many stations to work. The scatter was available for a long time, but no new stations appeared or answered our CQs. But at least we could improve our All-Time ODX on 3cm from well below 550km to 616km with OE5VRL/5.

Everything worked fine and flawlessly, so Murphy was around somewhere else, obviously…