VHF Contest July 2015

We started our contest weekend on thursday, as we still had to work on our brand new 70 cm station. The most time took our new eight 9 element DK7ZB antennas, which arrived on time a day before and had to be assembled. As we were done, we measured a bad SWR on all of them. A peek in the dipole box revealed the problem: the wire the manufacturer used was too long to connect the grounds of the DK7ZB match. The shortening of these wires took hours and a lot of curses at the manufacturer. Late in the evening we were done and ready to go on the next day.
As we checked the weather forecast on friday morning the last time, we realized that we had forgotten something important: a fridge. Luckily Ben DL6FBL had one we could take with us, and so nothing was standing between us and a successful contest.

At noon we arrived at the Wasserkuppe. It was sunny, but thanks to the steady wind there were pleasant temperatures around 24 degrees. A good place to be at that weekend! After a bath in sunscreen we started with the installation of the 70 cm towers and station, as we expected unexpected problems there. We built two 10 m towers, one with a 4x13 stack, the other non-rotatable with a star of the eight 9 ele every 45 degrees. The following, well trained, installation of the four 14 m 4x9ele. towers for 2 m was quick and flawless (record: 25 min for one), except the last one, where we measured a bad SWR. As we removed the caps of the dipole of the faulty antenna, we had a refreshing shower presumably by rain water from may. We let it dry over night and called it a day. Later that evening Henning DF9IC and Alex DL8AAU from DR9A arrived who had worked until their departure on their new 10 GHz system.

The next day we erected our last, now dry, 2 m tower. On 70 cm we had now a bad SWR on the "star", so we had to take the tower down again and found out that one of the rough-and-ready soldered matches seemed to be faulty. Instead of trying an on-site repair, we substituted that antenna with one from Hennings well equipped trailer. While we tested the 2 m and 70 cm station and made last preparations, Alex and Henning built the 10 GHz station, with a 1 m off-set dish on a 10 m tower.

The contest:

On 2 m we started with solid 125 QSOs the first hour, but then our rate decreased and at 0z we had 80 QSO less than in may. During the night, thanks to good activity on the band and the cold beverages from the fridge, we were able to catch up to our may result. We had good tropo to LA, so our ODX is LA0BY with 1058 km. He could hear us almost the whole contest, even when we didn't have an antenna in his direction. Unfortunately, from our "usual" ODX YU7ACO on their expedition on Peak Tornik in JN93 we could only hear pings. Activity in DL was noticably lower than in may, but a little bit higher outside DL, mainly in OK and G(W). At the end we have 1009 QSOs with 385k.

On 70 cm, as expected, we had some issues with the newly built station, consisting of a K3, Kuhne TXTVR and a Italab PA. Despite good-looking, the "star" antenna system proved to be quite useless, as our friends of DR9A predicted ;) Our signal was distorted in the first hour, in the evening we found the reason in some Microham-/Windows settings. Our RX wasn't good as well sometimes, so there's much room for improvement with the 70 cm station. ODX is LA0BY as well, we worked him in the morning with a faint CW-signal, only to have a strong SSB-station telling us an hour later that we are still strong. It was LA0BY, of course... Result is 254 QSO with 87k.

10 GHz started an hour late in the contest. Thanks to the great rainscatter condx Alex, who had hardly any experience on 10 GHz, was able to pile 80 QSO with 26k, ODX OM6A 652 km. Everytime we visited him in the GHz-trailer to check his well-being, we found him with a big smile and enthusiastic tellings of his operations. A new 10 GHz fan was born...

Henning also brought his 24/47/76 GHz equpiment, he accomplished 5 QSOs in total, on every band with DL0GTH (62 km) of course and on 24 GHZ with DK0NA (119 km).

A detailled report about the GHz-operations you can find here: http://www.dr9a.de/2015_07/report_07_2015.htm

Taking down the station took us 5 hours, this was 10 minutes too long as we came into a short but intense hailstorm (presumably charged by Alex' HF ;) before we could load the last pipe on our bus...