| A fieldday that we will always remember! Again we set the goal to beat DL0CS/P, who were dominating the
OC category for years. (or decades!?) Moreover I wanted to reach 1Mio points,
which would have been possible with better sporadic-E-conds (like
in 2002)
With 1280 QSOs and 240 Mults the million should be reachable.
(At the end abt 100Qs were missing, but 4 Mults more worked as
planned)
Again
I invited Stefan/DL1IAO to join me and Chris/DL1MGB, who I
knew from CN8WW. Fortunatelly both could already come on Friday,
so we started assembling the station at 17.00 local time.
At 20.30 we took a break for some grilled sausages and salad,
which my XYL Anja and a friend of hers had prepared.
The night before the contest the crew slept at my apartment in
order to have a "real" bed and be relaxed for the
weekend :-)
On saturday we had to get up early and managed to get to the
FD-QTH again at 09:30 local not without buying the usual fieldday
food...
Stefan and Chris started assembling Stefan`s new portabel tower,
which he bought from DL7ON last year.
Meanwhile I cared about the KT34XA and the wire antennas.
With the help of Ulrich`s truck we were able to lift the big
antenna to the top of our pneumatic tower more or less easily.
As usual it took almost to the beginning of the contest to fix all
antennas. Thank god no antennas had to be retuned!
30 minutes before the beginning the station in our car was ready
to go, but what? The IC4KL went to protect every time we
transmitted on 10-20m. 40-160 worked fine instead.
After a lot of testing around Helmut/DG6MDG had the right idea. Due to
voltage decrease of our generator the microprocessor of the ICOM
failed and we had to switch the linear off and on again to reset
it.
Band changes between the highbands now forced us almost every time
to swith the PA off and on again. But this is nevertheless faster
then tuning a "normal" linear with tubes.
In fact the IC4KL worked without any problems under these
difficult field conditions, the internal tuner (which was seldom
really necessary) was another thing nice to have.
15:00UTC: the contest starts
I checked the bands before the start and was very
disappointed...No sporadic on 10, even almost nothing on 15...
Nevertheless I start on 10, but can only work 8 DLs and HB9s
before I switch to 15.
Here the bunch of UA9/P is on and I´m able to work a lot of these
welcome 6 pointers.
But 15m is also not too good and I QSY to 20 to have a first good
run and complete the first hour with 56 QSOs. 20m is enjoyable and
I have 125 Qs after 2 hours...uuh, that`s better. I expected a
better start, but you can nothing do against the conds...
Now it`s Chris` turn. He works the whole contest without using a
paddle, which Stefan and I can`t believe. But using the Alt-K
feature he chases the mults around the bands like hell :-)
We are able to work a lot of good DX like JY9QJ (5 bands),
J8/DL1DA (2 bands), DL2GG/YV5 (3 bands), 4K9W (3 bands), HI8RV (2
bands), VK6AJ (10-20m), PY (80m), YV(80m), VR (2 bands), VU (2
bands),
ZL(20-40m), W (10-160m), DP1POL (40m) and a lot more semi rare
countries across EU.
Altough our packet cluster didn`t work for almost half of the
contest we pushed the number of mults to 244!
Our QSO-rate was quite stable around 50 per hour, best hour was 70, worst was
31 (towards the end).
Also the weather was on our side. We started having a
thunderstorm nearby that produced heavy QRN during the first
hours. Sitting on a mountain top on 1000m asl. thunderstorms can
be very dangerous, so we were really lucky that it didn`t came too
close.
While disassembling on sunday afternoon the thunderstorm returned
and gave us all a shower for free. It seems to be a rule that all equipment
has to be washed during fielddays :-)
Thanks all for this remarkable event, Stefan and Chris for taking
the "long way" down south and all of OV Lindau/T13 for helping in
various aspects.
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