IARU R1 144Mhz 2024

As this year, some of our team members met on Friday afternoon and started to set up the station. The weather was good and 3 of the 7 antenna systems had already been set up and tested by sunset.

After we had set up the other antenna systems on Saturday in bright sunshine, we were not ready to start at the beginning of the contest and had a delay of about 20 minutes. The reason for this was that a Wavenode directional coupler had somehow developed a mismatch which triggered the swr protection of the power amplifier. Once we had corrected this error, we achieved average QSO rates in the first few hours, but had to compete against several rivals who were already well ahead of us. They were probably taking advantage of better conditions around the Mediterranean. As a result, the night was a hard slog trying to make up lost time. At sunrise it became clear that the night crew had done a good job, leaving only SN7L and DR9A ahead of us.

Normally DA0FF is not that equally competetive on Sunday mornings and we are used to SN7L and DR9A scoring more points than we do. But this time it wasn't like that, we accomplished to leave SN7L behind us and managed to keep in contact (at best 7000 points) with the Hohloh-DR9A contest machinery. We hope that they enjoyed us being closer on their heels than ever before. Despite some technical problems and 'fireworks' this was a very encouraging event for us and we hopefully ended up coming second. What a nice contest!