In the German results of September VHF contest, we scored a very satisfying 6th place out of 92 participants, our best rank since 2001. Obviously, our 4x Big Wheel stacked 2nd system payed off. Now we are looking forward to the October UHF contest, where despite the rather bad weather forecast, we will again be QRV on 70cm, 23cm, 13cm and 3cm from JO30EM.
Due to an error that went unnoticed until the end of the contest, we only recorded the first 3 hours. So i decided to cut out all QSOs > 500km during that first 3 hours.
Times are in GMT, and they are all SSB.
Enjoy!
14:02 DL8UCC, JO71EQ, 574km
14:16 OZ6TY, JO55XE, 640km
14:22 G0XDI, IO91RQ, 500km
14:49 F8NZQ, JN35AX, 506km
15:14 DK0NK, JO61WM, 537km
15:18 DL5DWF, JO71AA, 542km
15:49 G6YB/P, IO81TJ, 621km
15:55 DL1RPL, JO62LI, 500km
16:01 DF2CK, JO71AD, 543km
16:02 DL0SP/P, JO62NM, 518km
16:05 DL7JTZ, JO73BJ, 620km
16:14 OE2SCM, JN67OV, 576km
16:18 G4DEZ, JO03AE, 527km
16:23 F1TDO, JN25LX, 516km
16:29 F1USF/P, JN14VM, 695km, a tough one!
16:41 DL8UAT, JO61TL, 519km
16:42 DL3MBG/P, JN67JT, 556km
16:45 M5BFL, IO91OO, 515km
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.
EDIT: Some audio is now available.
According to the October 2007 IARU results, we did quite well:
70cm: 8. place of 141
23cm: 5. place of 106
13cm: 7. place of 54
3cm: 18. place of 58
And overall result:
9. place of 155, and the best ranked station running only 4 bands!
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 :-).
The German July contest results are out, and we are quite satisfied with a 5th place on 2m, a 2nd place on 70cm, and a close 3rd place on 23cm behind DF0OL on 2nd place.
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 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.
We recorded our 70cm RX during July contest (2m did not work this time, sorry), and here are the QSOs > 750km as audio snippet. We could not record our own transmissions, so they are cut out from the recording, you are only hearing the other station, without the silence while we are transmitting.
OK2KJT, JN99AJ, 844km SSB [96kb]
I4LCK/4, JN54PD, 800km SSB [198kb]
IZ4BEH, JN54WL, 789km SSB [213kb]
I4AMD, JN64CI, 814km SSB [217kb]
OL9W, JN99CL, 853km SSB [230kb]
OK2KOJ, JN89HB, 753km SSB [89kb]
OK2KYZ, JO80NB, 765km SSB [241kb]
OK2KYC, JN99BM, 846km SSB [466kb]
OM8A, JN87WV, 884km CW [319kb]
OM5M, JN88RS, 821km CW [190kb]
OM3KII, JN88UU, 836km SSB [193kb]
OM3W, JN99CH, 857km SSB [163kb]
OE3A, JN77XX, 751km SSB [214kb]
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).