VHF Contest March 2016

After the long winter break we were keen on taking part in the March contest but due to personal obligations only three of the five core team members could attend this contest.

Nonetheless we (DL2ZXA, DK5MX, DL4XX) met at the contest QTH at 8.00 o’clock on Saturday morning with just 3 team members. The weather forecast had been bad with temperatures of -2 to -5° C and some snowfall. Like always the Wasserkuppe’s summit was swathed in dense fog and due to the bad weather forecast we had agreed on using a “small” setup which consisted of 3 antenna systems instead of 4.

After 4 hours antenna building we finally put up the masts and were supported by Ben (DL6FBL) who took a 2 hour break from his business commitments. Finally everything worked flawlessly and the contest could begin.

QSO rates were significantly lower than in March 2015 and there weren’t any conditions at all. Many signals seemed to suffer from some additional attenuation and QSB but the QSO number rose steadily.

Shortly after nightfall our west antenna’s SWR degraded rapidly and we finally lost that system around midnight. Caused by severe icing the SWR had risen to 1:4 and the antenna’s resonance had shifted down to 141 Mhz so that we could not use it anymore.

There were only 2 antenna systems left (south and east) but they also showed a continuously degrading SWR performance. After a night with very low QSO rates we were finally forced to go QRT for a while at dawn because all aerials were not usable and exhibited a horrifying SWR. Then it was time to take down the three systems for deicing them. Finally at around 10.00 UTC we were back then but had lost 3 hours of the precious Sunday morning traffic.

At 14.00 UTC we ended with 684 QSOs and carefully claim 206822 points, 84 WWLs, 16 DXCCs. ODX is 9A0V (911km).

We finally disassembled the station in heavy snowfall and left the summit at 17.00 UTC.