Here is the June contest report (by DL6AUI and DL2AKT) :
Experiencing June 2005 DARC Microwave Contest
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Contest weekend as usual, i.e. not normal but
extreme. First time in our contest history we crashed an antenna as you can
see on the photograph. Never before, a mast simply fall down. But sometime
is the first time, the only question is when. About the weather : Rain occurs when an High meets a Low front with humid air at a contest weekend. DL0GTH's rule of dump about weather conditions in the Thuringian Forest. Even the professional weather forecasters have adapted our contest weather rule of dump in their forecast. And the weather itself followed both the scientific as well as amateur weather forecast. Saturday began dry but very windy and with temperatures of about 12°C, not so bad for our antenna installation work. But we got rain in the night and lower temperatures which were stable at Sunday. We arrived Saturday 9 am on Schneekopf mountain and started with Champaign to celebrate Harti's (DL6AUI) 60th birthday. What a good start! We are all happy that he is still one of the most enthusiastic contesters and the good soul of the team. Then we continued to install the 23 cm 2m dish antenna on a 6m mast - as usual and without any problems (we thought). But after a couple of minutes we have watched in slow motion how the mast with the antenna and the 80W amplifier (just everything together) crashed down. Accidentally a rope was unfastened undetected during the erection work. Thank God no one was hurt. Immediately we got a problem. There was no other 23 cm antenna. We started planning and discussed options, e.g. go back to Gotha and get a yagi antenna. Roland, DK4RC, mentioned that an "abnormal" dish is for sure better than the best yagi. We started to repair but two OM's went to Gotha to get some repair material, coming back two hours later. We learnt again, that there is a solution if one needs to have a solution. Even with this unexpected and not planned additional activity we were ready to start 15 minutes to 14z. We are perplexed and did not know how to use the remaining time. The contest itself: Business as usual. Propagation conditions were not bad but not really good with a lot of contacts on 24 GHz, some rain scatter in 10 GHz, repaired 23 cm dish worked much better than expected and very good results on 13 cm based on new transponder with more output power. We left JO50JP after taking the final team photo just two hours after contest finished. We are looking forward to work with you on 144 MHz...47 GHz in July 2-3 contest. |
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