DK5OH
VHF Contest May 2022
After not being present in March we looked forward to taking part in the May competition. The weather was fine except for a little
thunderstorm on Sunday afternoon which forced us to go QRT for half an hour. This gave us the time to enjoy our classy Wasserkuppe barbecue and to discuss why the DR9A gang was again in front
of us……
Like some years ago we had planned to work on 144Mhz (4 towers with 4 x 9 element Tonna) and 432Mhz (1 tower with 4 x 4 x 9 element
DK7ZB).
An unpleasant thing we had to work on was some terrible noise coming directly out of the nearby radome. Finally in the evening we
could get access to the radome and found out that the radome’s ventilation system had gone into malfunction and desperately tried to restart itself again. This caused some beautiful noise
which abruptly ended after we had succesfully restarted the ventilation system.
Our only seldomely used 70cm station performed flawlessly with 4 x 4 x 9 elements in a star configuration attached to just one tower.
This antenna still seems to be quite competitive compared to its size. The only drawback is that we loose a few degrees of free take off into the radome’s direction.
Even a lot of fun was the 10Ghz activity. Dirk DO1HDR came along to ckeck out his 10Ghz station which is an entirely portable setup
with a tiny Procom dish and only a few Watts output. This modest setup provided remarkably solid results and with some little changes even more contacts would have been possible on 3cm. Maybe
a bigger dish and more pointing accuracy could do the trick…. Let’s find it out!
Conditions seemed to be slightly under average. Here are our claimed results:
144Mhz
Valid QSO: 1087
Points: 353789
Avg. Points: 325.5 km
Loc: 103
432Mhz
Valid QSO: 400
Points: 121397
Avg. Points: 303.5 km
Loc: 72
10Ghz
Valid QSO: 24
Points: 5081
Avg. Points: 211.7
73s de DA0FF
(DK2CX, DK4EE,DK5OH, DK5MX, DL2ZXA, DL6FBL,DO1HDR, DL4XX)
