VHF Contest May 2018

After our absence from the March contest we really looked forward to taking part in the May competition again. We did not need any weather broadcast this time because there was sunshine all over most parts of Europe.

We started erecting the station on Friday in bright sunshine and dismantled the station in bright sunshine on Sunday. What a nice barbecue weather, we really say thank you to the clerk of the weather!

This time we had planned to work on 144Mhz (4 towers with 4 x 9 element Tonna) and 432Mhz (1 tower with 4 x 4 x 9 element DK7ZB).

Tim (DK5OH) had successfully built a new notching lowpass filter which was supposed to kill the harmonics of the 2 Meter station. This measure has drastically reduced any interaction with the 2 Meter station on 70cm.

Another unpleasant thing we have to work on is some terrible noise on our westerly antenna system which made it useless for working weak signals below S5. We may have lost several thousand points in that direction on 144Mhz.

In contrast to that our slightly RX optimized 70cm station performed flawlessly with 4 x 4 x 9 element in a star configuration on just one tower. This antenna seems to be quite competitive compared to its size.

Despite the promising weather, the conditions seemed to be slightly under average so that we did not manage to break the 400K point barrier on 144Mhz. Here are our results.

73s de DA0FF
(DK2CX, DO9EE, DL6FBL, DK5OH, DK5MX, DL2ZXA, DL4XX)