Wednesday, June 3, 2020

PE75FREE final results

The 75FREE event is over. The results are really overwhelming...propagation was really good at times. Worldwide DX could be made. Of course the use of FT8 helped a lot but CW and SSB contacts were made as well. I did not only make HF contacts but also a few VHF on 6m and 2m. I even made one SSB contact on 2m, probabely the first in 10 years?

Worldwide contacts made by PE75FREE

A total of 5424 contacts with 99 DXCC were made, it includes a lot of dupes. In total 25000+ contacts from 137 DXCC were made by all the event stations. A incredible amount in one month!

Several operators were hunting us for the special award. It is amazing that some of them worked us on all bands. One station in particular was on top of all others. And most amazing is he did it without the use of digmodes. It was OH2YV Veikko from Finland. Veikko worked PE75FREE on 9 HF bands in both SSB as CW plus 30m CW. Other 75FREE stations are worked by Veikko on 6m, unfortunately I don't have my 6m beam up in the tower so I didn't manage to give him extra points. It is really amazing considering this OM is 85 years of age. Though,on the other hand, he has a lot of experience and seems to have a lot of time to chase SES on the bands...


Of course we, as operators of the 75FREE(DOM) team, did stay in touch with each other. With a chat app on the smartphone we warned when there was good skip on the bands. And we could make skeds of course. Hunting a bit to get the award ourself. At least I managed to get at the gold award. in the end. The DX cluster was coupled to the app so we were not on the same frequency but could be on the same band of course.






I took a day off at Friday to spend as much on the radio as possible. However I could not attend the shack since it is above my XYL her shop which always opens friday afternoon. So I removed my IC-706, power supply and laptop to the garage and connected the coax there. It actually was fun to make SSB contacts with such a minimal setup. The garage had a nice cool temperature and I operated there for several hours.







The propagation was really good during the event. DX and shortskip were very strong at times. Especially 40m FT8 in the morning brought some interesting DX. I've been listening several days for ZL stations on 60m FT8 but this time of the year it's difficult. Only ZL4OL made it into the log.
The shortskip, even inside the Netherlands, was really good last weekend around noon. Incredible signals on 20m from distances 100-400km away, you don't hear that every day. Of course this was all caused by the ES propagation that was unbelievable strong last week.

If you are curious who the operators were during this event find it on the Ynomy DX group site here:

http://www.ynomy.nl/2020/05/75free-event-and-team.html

The final story about P*75FREE on the Ynomy DX group site:

http://www.ynomy.nl/2020/06/75-free-event-top-chasers-and-awards.html

Post from fellow blogger en participant (PH75FREE):

http://www.ph0no.net/2020/06/free-month.html


* If you are not in the log and feel you made a QSO with me (PE75FREE only) please don't hesistate to e-mail me with the call, date and time of our QSO, I will check the log or the ALL.TXT file for busted QSOs. A correction will be send out to the QSL manager. *

Update 10-June: After more as a week I have not received any e-mail. I checked with eQSL and corrected the log. Log has been send to the QSL manager. I have closed the log now.

The log can be found here:

 https://secure.clublog.org/logsearch/PE75FREE

If you're no bureau member you can request a direct QSL via clublog with the link above.

-- PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME QSL Cards via bureau of direct.
I don't need your QSL. --

2 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Hallo Bas, dat zijn resultaten waar je met recht trots op kan zijn. Heel mooi. 73 Paul

VE9KK said...

Good evening Bas, congrats on your hard work, dedication and updates during this challenge. Unfortunately we never touched base during this time but I did make contact with one of the 75FREE team members.
Great job Bas,
73,
Mike
VE9KK