Many thanks to Heiko, DG1BHA, for leaving this “contest slot” to me. Normally he’s using our station for this one as it does not make much sense to drive 2 x 700 km for a 2 hour contest. Sure, I’m crazy for contesting but certainly not *that* crazy. 😉 This weekend was different as I was overhere (JO73) anyway as I’m going to visit my grandma at the Baltic Sea who turns 88 tomorrow. Due to some other circumstances, too, I thus had the chance to do the contest.
You need to work lots of German DOKs for mults thus have to rely on good backscatter. Best scatter points are between 80° and 120° this time of the day but we still have some noise into that direction that makes weak signal copy difficult. Besides this I used a frequency that was obviously used by somebody else, too, whom I could not hear (there were a number of callers out of sync, ooops). And then the radar set in, too. So I really had a bad start for the first 20 minutes wasting precious time until I finally got going higher in the band. Rate was okay then beaming 230° for the second best backscatter direction without additional noise (despite 2 short phases with static noise of S9 due to heavy rain which made copy difficult, too). Spent the last 15 minutes on CW (after the rate dropped significantly on SSB) and hoped for a nice pileup being fresh meat there but that didn’t happen either. At least a few new mults called in …
I had 2 goals: a.) Doing 200 QSOs and b.) reaching 20k points. I surpassed 20k points with a good margin but was short of QSOs compared to my goal. Well, reasons are above … isn’t it good to have some excuses? 🙂
Let’s see, if all goes well it should be good enough for a TOP10 spot …
DARC 10-Meter Contest Call: DH8BQA Class: SO Mixed HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 2 Summary: Band QSOs ------------ CW: 13 SSB: 166 ------------ Total: 179 Mults = 137 Total Score = 24,523