Our traditional kick-off of the contest season is the CQWWRTTY.
Despite that we had a total new setup with new radio’s and computers we had unusual few technical issues. Having a multi radio conteststation on a limited footprint has always been a challenge so we are more and more experienced in solving, or at least reducing, the issues which come with this. A combination of 80m and one of the higher bands (not sure whether it was 10m or 15m) sometimes gave RF feedback to the shack 1 computer stalling the internet connection and logging for a few minutes and sometimes required a reboot. As we all know modern RTTY contesting is more a computer relying project so yess, this was no fun.
Another mystery was our 40m dipole. Some kind of error showed by times giving very bad SWR. A nighttime inspection did not reveal the cause. A daytime inspection made it clear. A branch of a tree hit the antenna resulting in the irregular faults. Kees BWD and a saw solved this problem.
It was a contest as we had many before: Fun, broken filter, fun, new antennas, fun, long shifts, fun, learning on the job, fun, smoke from bandfilter, fun, etc., fun
The team this year: Kees PA3BWD, Ronald PA3EWP, Fred PA3GDG, Ton PA1CC, Richard PD4RD and Alex PA1AW. A well balanced team.
We like to thank all who called us. Cu next time ?¿
Some pictures to give you an impression:
