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.

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 :-).

We published the details of our IARU September VHF contest participation.
Pictures:

Thanks everyone for the QSOs. We recorded nearly the whole contest as MP3, and i will cut out the QSOs > 800km during the next day and publish them here.

UPDATE:
First audio sample is the (not complete) QSO with ED1OCV for roughly 1300km: ED1OCV IN63AR(?) 1318km SSB
QSOS > 800km:
14:48 UTC OZ6ABA JO57DJ 806km SSB
16:30 UTC GM4ZUK/p IO86RW 923km SSB
20:04 UTC OK2VMU JN99CO 850km SSB (not easy!)
22:05 UTC OM3KHE JN99JC 904km SSB (some QRM)
22:48 UTC OM3KII JN88UU 836km SSB
00:01 UTC TM8CDX/p IN94UT 807km SSB
00:14 UTC ED2EA IN93IA 1017km SSB
00:25 UTC EA2RL/p IN83FE 1109km SSB ODX!
01:43 UTC OM5M JN88SS 827km CW
01:50 UTC OM0C JN88VJ 858km CW
01:58 UTC 9A5Y JN85PO 977km CW
02:10 UTC OM8A JN87WV 884km CW
03:07 UTC OK2KJT JN99AJ 844km CW
03:58 UTC OK2KJU JN89SJ 808km SSB
04:02 UTC OK2PVF JN99JQ 890km SSB
04:16 UTC SN9D JN99MQ 908km CW
11:58 UTC OM3CQF JN88RT 820km SSB

If you worked DR5A for a QRB of less than 800km and you are interested in knowing how your signal sounded in JO30EM, just drop me a line at dl1ely@dr5a.de and i will send you the sound snippet of our QSO.

During his holidays in Sweden, Lars DF1LON visited the site of the famous SK7MW VHF&up contest station and took some impressive photos. We hope for many more contact with that guys on as many bands as possible.

To give our signals on 23 and 13cm some more punch, we will use a new dish starting October 2006, going from 1.2m diameter to a whopping 2m. The below picture shows that new monster beside his proud owner Alfred, DK3OS, during the first assembly. We are very excited about that new toy and are curious what we can achieve with it in the October UHF/SHF/Microwave-Contest.

I made the following little updates to the site:

• First pictures of July contest (but still more to come)
• Tabular results of all contests of last year (DK3OS in 2005)
• I introduced the nice new header graphics, featuring selected pictures of our contest operations. They are rotating, so most likely you will see different pictures when reloading or revisiting our page. I plan to include more different header pictures over time.

Gradually, i will go back and add all the results of previous year back to 1998 when the group started “serious” operation.

I played around with some pictures i took from a tripod during May 2006 contest, and threw them together in photoshop. I selected “teamwork” as a name, as it shows that the effort DR5A puts into contesting would be impossible without that good and experienced team behind that callsign.