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.

For some days now, the German March contest results are published. With our very little effort on 2m we reached only 21st place out of 71 participants, but on 70cm and 23cm our effort paid off, and we were 4th (out of 41) and 3rd (out of 27) respectively. On 13cm we got 5th place of 11 participants. On 70cm, we managed the 3rd best DX contact in Germany, and on 23cm we managed to log the best DX of all German participants (I4LCK/4 at 800km distance). On this band, we had a tie with DM7A regarding QSO count (82), but could beat them by just 72 points (17994 to 17922) after log checking. This was a surprise, as they claimed a slightly higher than we did. In the German contest trophy, multi-op section we are on place 5, with DF0YY and DK0CG just a tad behind us, but already a bigger margin to the top 4 spots. See you in May!

This March contest was characterized by the lack of operators. We only had 4 people setting up and taking down everything, and only 3 OPs for the contest (DF1LON, DK2CRN, DO7GG). Additionally, the last two days before the contest we got 10-15cm of fresh snow at our QTH, so that we could not do our pre-setup on friday because there was no way to pull our caravan-trailer to the QTH. We postponed everything to saturday, where we experienced much sun, only low winds and fast-melting snow, but also too less time to set up everything in time. Due to lack of operators, we omitted 3cm altogether, and 2m was only set up as a low-effort with a single 9el yagi to kill some time for the 3rd operator. Main focus was on operating 70cm and 23/13cm with full power. Still, we started late on all bands (70cm abt. 30min late, 23cm about 60min late). 2m was only operating for about 12 hours, SSB only.
70cm and 23cm ended up with very fine results. 70cm sported the highest score for some years for a march contest, nearly the best average per qso of every march contest, equalized our best number of squares worked in march from 2002 (49), and set a new record for worked countries in a march contest (13). 23cm was even better, with the highest score, highest number of squares (28) and countries (10) ever worked in a march contest.
13cm performed quite on average.

All the details are here.

There is some confusion about what results published online are THE results of the IARU VHF Contest 2008. There are two different “official” results:
- The one from HRS, the croatian IARU-member, officially assigned the task of taking over the adjucation (missing, for example, DL)
- The one from ÖVSV respectively OE1MCU, IARU Region I chairman of the VHF/UHF/MW Committee (missing, for example, OK)

Obviously, everyone is invited to pick the list that fits him better :-). I am sure there will be some clarification soon.

The IARU-Region-I UHF Contest Results are out (big PDF). Especially our result on 23cm is very satisfying, as after winning the DL MO competition, internationally we lost to PA6NL only by a very small margin of less than 300 points. On 70cm, we only had 2% of score-reduction due to logging errors, which is a very good value.

The results of the 2008 VHF IARU-Region-1-Contest are out. We finished in 13th place of 182 participants in the MO section.

Our team will kick off the 2009 season with our “as usual” participation from JO30EM:
2m: 750w, 4×9el
70cm: 600w, 8×11el
23cm: 200w, 2m dish
13cm: 40w, 2m dish
3cm: 10w, 70cm dish

We are looking forward to all the QSOs with you.

In the German Contest Trophy 2008, multi-operator section, we finish 6th. This is the worst result of the last years, despite piling up more and more points every year: Competition gets tougher, and we are surpassed by other stations putting much effort in this trophy. Still, we are the best-ranked station running only 5 bands, while the stations in front of us are running much more microwave-bands or even laser-light communication. So, we have to be still satisfied. We are using our winter break now for some improvements and replacement of broken/worn out things, and will happily return in 2009 for another year of VHF/UHF/SHF/Microwave-Contesting from JO30EM. Stay tuned for DR5A!

The German October UHF Contest Results are out for some days now. And for the first time ever, we won 23cm MO! Taking advantage of the bad luck of DL0GTH, who had to abort contest operation from their site on sunday morning, we could also keep the strong crew of DM7A behind us, who did some more QSOs, but suffered from a much worse average. We did not only win, but also completed the 5 best ODX-QSOs reported in DL, all beating the ODX of DL0GTH with 788km. We really did not expect that, and by that we get rewarded for our hard work in rewiring the transceivers to keep 23cm on the air after we lost the HF-transceiver we use together with our 23cm transverter.

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.
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