IARU R1 145mhz Contest 2016

---Good Saturday and bad Sunday---

As always most of the team members met on Friday afternoon abt 17:00 and started assembling the station. The weather was fine and 3 of the 4 antenna systems had already been erected and tested by sunset

After building up the fourth antenna system on Saturday morning in bright sunshine we were ready to go. When the contest started we experienced exceptional high QSO rates throughout the first six hours. Consequently the night was a head-to-head race with OE1W who always managed to be a little bit ahead of us but all in all QSO numbers during the night lagged behind our expectations.

At sunrise it became clear that we obviously suffered from a weather change because like always (see our reports before) we were suddenly covered in a wet mist. Cold winds and heavy rain blew over the Wasserkuppe’s summit. Believe us that this was really ugly again but the worst thing was that our QSO rates went down. Our competitors did not seem to have such problems and managed to overtake us then. Of course the weather did not recover and so we finally teeth-gnashingly ended the contest 5th with 1057 QSO, ca. 407000 claimed points (avg. 385km/QSO).
QSO over 900km:
1051 I4CVC/7
1040 YU7ACO
1013 YU1LA
1008 YT4B
1004 YT0A
924 LA6VBA
920 HA8IH
919 UR7DWW
911 9A0V
910 9A50CBM
909 9A0KG

To make things perfect all team members were soaked to the skin when disassembling the station in heavy rainfall and strong winds. We left the Wasserkuppe 2 hours after the end of the contest, but we will be back in November 73 de DA0FF Team