This year I took part in a group of hamradio contest enthousiasts, our contestcall is PA6AA. In 2017,2018 and 2019 we built a complete contest station near the coast here in northern Netherlands. But due to personal circumstances it is not possible to do so anymore. The new "explorer" section gave us the possebility to form a conteststation connected via the internet, everyone was operating from their own radioshack. In theory you can have 6 stations on air at the same time. We had 4 stations available. Time is a issue of course, not everyone could operate the whole weekend. In the end it is just a hobby and we all have our private life as well. Operating from home is also a disadvantage, it is easier to have breaks for tea, coffee, lunch, diner etc. and no one that replace you at the radiodesk at those moments. That means in the end we just had brief moments with 4 stations on air at the same time.
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| PA4OES full moon impression |
Respect for PA4OES and PD1RP who begun in the middle of the night right at the start of the contest (local time 02:00). Personally I started at 06:00 local time, early enough for me. At the start I operated most time on 160/80/40, it went reasonable though not really big runs. It all is about getting spots on the DX cluster, but even when I got a spot I didn't get real pile-ups. I think this counted for the other members of the crew as well. Luckely I did get my share of 10m operating, which did went well on Saturday but less on Sunday probabely due to propagation disturbing issues, I saw the A-index suddenly rising to 19 which isn't a good sign. I really didn't hunt DX actually, although I worked some interesting stations. Noticable is my contact with KC1XX on 160m, the only transatlantic QSO I made on that band. I worked several USA stations on 80m and 40m, on higher bands this is not unusual.
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| PD0ME antennas |
Working from home and being in contact via chat is something else as working together from a contest location. But it went well, we had a lot of fun. Change or exchange of bands could be discussed and went without any problems. If someone wanted to have time off it was no problem at all. This is great and it is the way we should do this next time as well. In the end this is just a hobby. If you want to do contests to win you need a whole other approach; planning, propagation research, lots of power, more operators that work in shifts etc. I think we did well in this new "explorer" section for a first time. It certainly is something I want to do again, the other members certainly think the same. I'm shure we can beat our score next year, just have a goal and have a lot of fun again!
Here are some facts:
6 band QSOs were made with: 9A1A, 9A5Y, DP7D, ES5G, EW5A, KC1XX, LY4A, LZ9W and RL3A. Well done!
2 comments:
Good morning Bas, excellent results and most important you all had fun. As you say it is a hobby and yes there are those that take it seriously but that is their choice. I have not heard of this new explorer entry but it is an entry that really works for folks who can't just gather in one location.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
Hello Mike, tnx for the comment. This new section works well for us. 73, Bas
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