VHF Contest May 2023

Friday:

DL6FBL and DK5OH arrived on the Wasserkuppe at 12.30 pm on Friday. Then one hour later our Bavarian friends Dj2MX, DJ4MX and DK2CX joyned in and soon after DO1XX from Hamburg arrived with his 10 Ghz shack bus. The setup went well, it was warm, sunny and we were burned by the sun. Therefore we took a short rest and celebrated the arrival of DL8AAU and DF5HC from Darmstadt with a beer & barbecue break. After we had set up 3 antenna masts for 2m DK5MX arrived and we started building the 70cm mast with our 4 x 4 x 9 element DK7ZB yagi groups. Moreover we installed our very important coffee shack. Then finally at 6.30pm rainshowers combined with a thunderstorm ended our setup activity. Sponsored by Max (DK5MX) who has become the proud father of two healthy twin girls we spent a social open end evening together with 20 litres of draft beer.

Saturday:

Then on Saturday at 10:00pm we started finishing our setup and all our antennas were ready to go at 11.00pm. Afterwards we set up the 70cm shack on one of the trailers and wired the music racks for 70cm. Finally we checked the signal quality and measured power on all bands. At 2pm the stations were ready for operation. Afterwards we solved some minor software problems until the start of the contest. The contest started slowly and no enhanced conditions could be observed in JO40XL. Watching the Slowenian Live Score made us uneasy. Apparently super conditions south of the Alps to OM and OK were present and some stations even seemed to work some Sporadic E. After some hours we were behind expectations. Moreover we found out that we had had a technical problem on 2 meters until half of the contest and we had to go QRT for 1 hour to find and to fix it. Then catching up with the other station s was quite hard. We enjoyed a nice head to head fight with IQ5NN and OM3KII who run less QSOs but high km averages per QSO. In the meantime Dirk (DO1XX) tested his new 10Ghz station for the first time and Alex (DL8AAU) logged a few 24Ghz contacts but there was low activity.

Sunday:

The weather was fine on Sunday and slowly but steadily we managed to get closer to the elading teams on 144Mhz. 432 was running without any problems. Around 12h UTC we managed to overtake our competitors on 2 meters with nice QSO rates of 50QSO/h. Finally the result is very similar to last year. All in all we had a very good time with our visitors and enjoyed the sunny weather when dismantling the stations within 3 hours. We finish the contest with

144mhz:

1034 QSO

329303 points

432mhz:

383 QSO

117458 points

10Ghz:

25 QSO

4487 points

24Ghz:

2 QSO

213 points

Thanks for QSO 73 de DA0FF team

(DF5HC, DJ2MX, DJ4MX, DK2CX, DK5MX, DK5OH, DL4XX, DL6FBL, DL8AAU, DO1XX)