IARU R1 UHF Contest 2017

Rain and fog and fog and rain and........

After optimizing 32 x 9 Element DK7ZB yagis on Thursday before the contest Tim (DK5OH) and Max (DK5MX) spent some hours on shrink tubing the 32 phasing lines and 64 N plugs After doing that they loaded our trailer. This was quite an exhausting exercise and they fell asleep at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Our new weather experiment started on Friday morning when they arrived on the Wasserkuppe's summit in dense fog, gusty winds (50kmh) and dizzling rain (like always). Despite the weather they bravely erected one tower and finished all the other necessary preparations for the rest of the station.

This time we had planned to use a new setup on 4 single antenna towers. Every tower was equipped with 8 x 9 Element DK7ZB yagis. On Friday evening tower no. 2 was ready to be raised and they finished arranging the shack. What followed was the ususal classy Wasserkuppe barbecue in dizzling rain with a temperature of 5 °C. Nice !

After Andy's (DL4XX) arrival on Saturday the rest of the station was built up and first test QSOs were done in the early afternoon. Astonshingly everything seemed to work like a charm.

Right in time for the beginning of the contest the weather conditions detoriated and dizzling rain turned into pouring rain. At that time the rain cloud was so dense that we could barely see our lowest antennas at 6 meters height. Of course there were absolutely no conditions present.

Despite the poor conditions we had a nice pile up at the beginning and worked 81 QSOs in the first and 62 QSOs in the second hour. When Gerald (DL1RG) arrived in the afternoon we were ready for the night. Gerald accomplished some nice CW contacts but being fed up by the poor conditions we went to sleep at 3.00 am and went QRT for 4 hours.

Suffering from some computer problems, a lack of operators and 70cm experience and some RX intermodulation problems we could not defend our 2nd place in front of DL0GTH and lost more and more QSOs on Sunday morning.

We finally claim 449 QSOs and 136846 points.

TOP 10
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1. SM7GVF JO77GA 787 km
2. SM6CEN JO67AJ 782 km
3. HG6Z JN97WV 776 km
4. F6KCZ/P IN99PI 774 km
5. I3NPF/4 JN63DV 753 km
6. I4CIV JN63FX 747 km
7. G5B IO92WS 741 km
8. SM7NR JO76RC 725 km
9. IZ4JMU JN54WE 715 km
10. IZ3NOC/5 JN54QF 704 km

All in all we are satisfied with the result. This was our first 70cm only contest and now we know what has to be improved for the next contest. We will be back !

See you in November.

73 de DA0FF JO40XL