A nice contest with sunshine and warmth. Problems included some minor damaged cables discovered during setup, some NF-related problems (humming) on 23/13cm, and a burnt connector near the antennas on 2m, likely causing the comparatively bad result on 2m, and costing us 90 minutes on 2m to find and fix the problem. On the other hand, after some changes to the setup, our 13cm rig survived the whole contest and played well, contrary to some of the previous contests. We hope to have that issue fixed now. Our new team members Timo, DL3TS and Philip, DL8PP (welcome!) did a great job and are strengthening our team considerably. Highlights included working TK5EP/P on 2m, and being called by GD0EMG on 70cm.

You can find the detailed report of our May Contest participation here.

Well, we survived “Emma”, the big big storm of this weekend. We were able to set up the usual antennas for 2m, 70cm, 23cm and 13cm, although we did not start on all bands in time. We omitted 3cm due to the very strong winds on saturday. 2m and 70cm antennas were set up on friday in calmer winds, and withstand everything without problems. That is a good proof how reliable and sturdy our equipment is. We only got a little problem on the 23/13cm dish, where the rotator got loose, so that we could not turn the antenna during the last 1-2 hours of the contest, but that was already the biggest problem we got. Again, we lost our preamplifier on 13cm. We have to do something about that urgently. Scores on 2m and 70cm were “as usual” for a March, while 23cm suffered from the late setup, the rotator problems at the end of the contest and generally the very low participation from hill-top stations. Thanks to Timo, DL3TS, who jumped in to fill the gaps that our lack of operators left. While the operator list does not look too bad, all operators beside DF1LON were available only part-time. So the help of Timo was very appreciated!

Details here.

I uploaded our claimed scores of the October IARU-UHF-Contest. We enjoyed nice autumn weather and great conditions, leading to some new all-time records on 70cm and 23cm. Especially the 23cm results excelled everything we achieved before by far. Thanks for all those nice QSOs. We recorded our 70cm audio, and during the next days i will snip out the DX-QSOs (most likely everything above 800km) and will post it here. Stay tuned.

I updated the site with our September VHF Contest claim. All in all it was a nice contest without equipment failures, with some lifted conditions and nice (dry) weather. We already experienced worse in the years before :-).

We tried to record the contest as MP3, but after the contest we discovered a potential problem with the recordings made, but we still have to look into the files and decide whether they are usable. In that case, we will upload some sound snippets of exceptional QSOs to the site.

EDIT: The audio recording are now available here.

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.

So many ups, and one big down - that was June contest for DR5A: Everything went very well, including nice dry weather, a setup without any hassles, time for preparing the new bought caravan trailer for the next contests, and last but not least fine condx, good activity and extraordinary QSOs on 23 and 13cm. The following new all-time bests have been set in this contest, even beating the October IARU microwave contest results:

- Best score on 23cm ever (37.868 points)
- Most QSOs on 23cm in a June contest (111)
- Most Countries worked on 23cm ever (11)
- Most Squares worked on 23cm in a June contest (41)
- Best average points/QSO on 23cm ever (341)
- new all-time ODX 869km (OL7Q, JN99FN)

- Best Score on 13cm ever (14.024 points)
- Most QSOs on 13cm ever (46)
- Most Countries worked on 13cm ever (8)
- new all-time ODX 751km (OE3A, JN77XX)

The top ten QSOs on 23cm are all towards east, with impressive 4 stations from JN99 on top, thank you guys!

3cm was on par with previous contests, lacking rainscatter condx, but with a slight emphasis on QSOs > 300km compared to what we are used to.

BUT - Murphy never sleeps…such an extraordinary contest needed a very extraordinary final:
While preparing the 23/13cm tower for taking down, DL1ELY forgot to hook up a security steel wire from the top of the dish to our helper mast, and held one of the guy wires in his hands only. Suddenly, all the weight of the mast-top-installations (2m dish, transverters, filters, PAs, preamps for 23cm and 13cm) fell over to the opposite side, and he could not hold the guy wire with his hands. Everything crashed to the ground, effectively destroying the new 2m wire dish (only 11 months old), bending the tube carrying the dish above the rotator, and heavily damaging all the HF stuff sitting at the mast top, breaking the housings, tearing off connectors and other stuff located behind the dish. Finally, the crash also killed one of our wooden chairs we use to support the tower when it is on the floor. Luckily, no one else was near the site of the crash, so no one got hurt. But still, the workload- and financial aspect of that crash are not nice, especially given the pressure to have some replacement ready in only 1 months time. doh!

Find more pictures here…

See all the score details here.

May contest was one with mixed feelings. We enjoyed some nice weather and everything seemed to be alright until we tried to transmit on 2m and discovered a fault in our FT-1000MP TRX. Repair attempts of over 2 hours led to a late start on 2m at 14:33 UT. Shortly after that, 13cm died (again) after just one QSO. Taking down the antenna and trying to solve the problem cost another 2 hours of operating time on 23cm. We could not get 13cm back to work (needless to say that it works again flawlessly when tested at home, grrrr).

2m was generally slow in terms of QSOs, and so we finished with a rather meager number of QSOs and score, but nice tropo conditions to Scandinavia brought big fun. 7 LA and 9 SM are new all-time-bests. Thanks to Stefan, LA0BY, for nice tropo ODXs on 2m and 70cm. The south-LA beacons had a really big signal starting saturday evening. But beside that, the usual “East-South-East”-path worked well, with stations like 9A5Y, SN9D, OM50KHE, OM8A, OK2KRT, OM3KII, OM5M (all > 800km) in the log. 70cm was working out very well, with a very satisfying score, and 4 LAs in the log! We even worked S5 on 70cm, a rather rare event. 23cm was also quite nice regarding the circumstances: 3 OZ stations in the log also show the nice conditions to the north. 3cm was quite normal, except for the exceptional tropo QSO with OZ1FF, giving us a new tropo ODX by far, wow!

You can see the details here.

March contest is over. And while we enjoyed spring-like weather with blue sky, sun and relatively high temperatures an friday and sunday, saturday was a hard one. Very strong storm, heavy rain and temperatures around 0 slowed everything down, and did not allow us to pull up the microwave antennas (well, forgetting parts of the 23cm dish at home was not helpful, either). Our tent survived the heavy storm with some little damages, and we were lucky that we did set up the 2m and 70cm antennas already on friday. So we could start that bands on time, while the microwave bands started around 3 hours late. As we were also very low on operators (4 on saturday, 3 on sunday) the microwave bands suffered even more, as they were not QRV all the time. Finally, we achieved very satisfying scores on 2m and 70cm, while 23 to 3cm were rather disappointing. One of the highlights on 2m was the call of LA4YGA for 860km. On the other hand, we worked only one OE, late on sunday.

All the details are here.

Georg, DL1ECG, uploaded his pictures of the CQWW DX SSB contest we did with a small team using DR5A. We tried a portable setup on our VHF location JO30EM and participated in the M/S category.

Our claim from the 3830 score reflector:

CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB
Call: DR5A
Operator(s): DB9EX, DF1LON, DK2CRN, DL1ECG, DL1ELY
Station: DR5A

Class: M/S HP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:

 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:  129     6       42
   80:  334     9       61
   40:  270    22       88
   20:  717    36      125
   15:  435    33      122
   10:  194    16       82
------------------------------
Total: 2079   122      520  Total Score = 2,165,466

Club: Rhein Ruhr DX Association

Comments:

Not many of you already knew DR5A. The call is mainly used for VHF contest
operation from our portable location. After a rather successfull VHF and up
season we decided to make our first M/S entry from that location. On friday
morning we set up our small portable contest station:

Running station:
FT1000MP + AL80b
FB-33 (3ele 20m/15m/10m) 12m up
Windom (160m/80m/40) 80m long and 16m up
Vertical 40m

Multi station:
FT1000MP + Acom 1010
R7000 (40m-10m)

We are satisfied with the score compared to our small setup. What we missed
several times was a second beam for the Multi station. On day two it was very
difficult to get the rare and needed multis. Sometimes we switched the beam
from the running station to the multi station which resulted in a very loud
“ahh”: signal increased from S1 to S7 and only one call was needed to log a
certain station.
Very high local noise on 160m of S9. We could not really find the source as
there are green fields, green fields and green fields around us. But we have
some wind turbine near to us and maybe they cause that noise floor.
High band conditions on Saturday were very good and we even logged US on 10m.
On Sunday not a single US station was heard on 15m and rather low US rates even
on 20m. Very nice Sunday evening 10m opening to Zone 8, 9 and 10.

…are here. A longer report and more detailed statistics will follow soon.

EDIT: The detailed report is now online, enjoy!