Our traditional kick-off of the contest season is the CQWWRTTY.
The hiughlights of the contest:
- 10m open for 90% of the contest
- Only 3 times the main PC needed a restart and just one power failure in shack 2
- The visit of the PI4KAR team
- We smashed our own national record by 15%
10m really made this contest a different experience. Not only was it open almost the entire contest, it also kept away the stations from the other bands. Getting the multipliers in on the other bands was hard. The good thing was that day two was still a day chasing multipliers š
Despite that a little different setup 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.
On |Saturday we had a team from PI4KAR visiting our station. It was fun to show the station and to share our thoughts and experience with this enthousiastic group of amateurs who wish to make the move to serious contesting on a new location.
A mystery was our 10m yagi. A week before the contest it was useless. High SWR no matter what we did. So we were prepared to use our tribander as the main 10m antenna but luckely the 10m turned out just fine. With these conditions we would have missed a lot with only our small antenna on 10m.
It was a contest as we had many before: Fun, broken filter, fun, new antennas, fun, long shifts, fun, learning on the job, fun, visitors, fun, etc., fun
The team this year: Kees PA3BWD, Ronald PA3EWP, Fred PA3GDG, Ton PA1CC, Richard PD4RD and Alex PA1AW.
A well balanced team.
A small impressum:
