Marconi Memorial Contest 2016

Hi VHF contesters,

this year’s bottom line of the contest is: The weather was a world-class ar…..

The beautiful weather enabled us to erect the station and antennas in constantly pouring rain. Nevertheless being a good team we managed to finish this job after 4 ½ hours but were soaked to the skin (as usual-> read our September report) and felt a little bit worn-out.

Of course it was time for a classy Wasserkuppe November barbecue and a German beer then and we all quickly recovered from the morning’s exertions. While enjoying this event we forgot about the time and started the contest 5 minutes too late. Consequently the advertised working frequency 144.051 Mhz was occupied so that we had to move a little bit up. After half an hour we had an interesting 5 minute blackout because of our appliance leakage current interrupter: Someone had plugged in a wet coffee brewer. The first hour ended with 64 QSOs in 2016 compared to 81 QSOs in 2015.

We did not manage to catch up the missing QSOs for the next 5-6 hours and the gap compared to Marconi 2015 grew constantly. At midnight we had already lost 37 QSOs. Similar to this year’s September contest the QSO rates during the night lagged behind our expectations and we lost even more QSOs.

As you can see Sunday’s result compared to 2015 was significantly worse:

Compared to 2015 the rise of QSO numbers was much flatter in 2016 on Sunday which can be clearly seen in the charts.

All in all it is evident that we made 155 less QSOs than in 2015 and gained 87440 less points. The average distance in 2015 was 429 km/QSO in contrast to 395 km/QSO in 2016.

Obviously the conditions towards France and Great Britain had been much better in 2015 and more than 30 G and lots of F stations could not be worked in this year’s competition.

Despite the lack of any conditions in any direction our score could be high enough to be under the top 3 teams again, we will see… Noteworthy to mention is the fact that we had to deice our 4 antenna systems several times.

Dismantling the station after the contest was a real pleasure again. Right in time at the end of the contest snowfall set in (-2° Celsius) and we enjoyed the white and wet powder on our material and the exhausted operators. What a nice surprise but only the strong survive.

73s de

DL6FBL DK5MX DK5OH DK9IP DL2ZXA