IARU R1 144Mhz 2022

What an interesting competition!

Only 3 of our team members met on Friday afternoon and started assembling the station like crazy. The weather was ok and 4 of the 8 antenna systems had already been erected and tested by sunset and it was time to enjoy a classy Wasserkuppe barbecue. The folowing morning two more team members arrived. When building up the last tower one of us slipped over the 2 x 17 Ele. yagis and bend one of the directors by 90 degrees. You probably can imagine what happened when we hastily tried to bend it back! It broke into two parts and there was no direct replacement, therefore one of our spare Tonna directors had to replace the original. We have no clue how bad this was for the performance of the entire antenna system.

The contest started too early for us (the tower with 2 x 17 and 3 x 6 was still down) and we experienced low QSO rates throughout the beginning compared to other years.

Consequently there were many stations ahead of us when the night started. OE1W who must have had an amazing start was several 10k points ahead of us but even some French stations surprised us by their high scores at that time. But at sunrise our spirits and score had risen and DR9A who was placed second at that time was only 10k points ahead of us. But this was the last time that we could get that close to the first two teams. Like always we lost the Sunday morning battle and saw an intense SN7L and DR9A battle. Finally the DR9A contest machine performed a strong as an ox performance (like always on Sundays). Congratulations to the winning teams but we will be back!

Scores

QSO: 1233

Points: 465000

ODX: CT2HXM IN60CR 1749km (MS)

Due to the fact that we were only 5 team members this time we left the Wasserkuppe 4.5 hours after the end of the contest.

73 de DA0FF Team (DK4EE, DK5OH, DL2ZXA, DL6FBL, DL4XX)