Starting in high power category again as we feel that low power and wire during these condx ain´t no fun!

So a lot of work to do, but fortunatelly Stefan could come on friday noon this year so after a richful meal at my mother´s house we managed to build the antennas until friday evening and saturday would only be for lifting the antennas into the air and station setup.

We had beautiful weather on friday and until saturday afternoon, but then it started to rain and didn´t stop until half an hour before the end of the contest. puh, that was luck! So we could clean up the fieldday QTH without getting wet to the bones.

A few problems occured anyway... The rotator was loose and so the wind twisted the antenna round up to 90 degrees!
And the upper section of the crank up tower stuck while cranking it down and we had some problems getting the antenna down. But with some hardware from the farmhouse this was finally solved.

For the first time we installed a beverage antenna (160m long) direction N/NE and that was really useful as we faced heavy static noise on all bands from about 2 am until the end of the contest. On 80m the QRN was 9+ on the dipole, but the noise on the beverage was quite ok! A lot of QSOs wouldn´t have been possible without it.
On 40m the beverage was quite sharp, so it didn´t help so much and we often felt like a crocodile. Later the A3 developed bad SWR on 20m, there must have been water in one of the traps, so at times we only had one choice of operating: the R7 on 20m, because 80, 15 and 10 were dead and 40m impossible because of the QRN :-)

The result of the contest is quite surprising. Despite the bad condx and listening problems we managed to work a lot of stateside on 20m and even 40m and with the last QSO, which was a multiplier we topped our result from 2007.

Thanks to our helpers DG4BUL, DG6MDG & sons and DF5UL!