IOTA Contest - 2023
Call: SV9/DH8BQA
Operator(s): DH8BQA
Station: SV9/DH8BQA
Class: SO(A)24CW QRP
QTH: KM15VM
Operating Time (hrs): 22
Summary:
Band CW Qs CW Mults Ph Qs Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
80: 48 18
40: 208 37
20: 356 46
15: 365 38
10: 96 10
----------------------------------------
Total: 1073 149 0 0 Total Score = 1,210,625
Club: Bavarian Contest Club
Comments:
RIG:
Icom IC-705 + Elecraft T1 tuner @ 5 watts
Antennas:
Chellegance MC-750 (adjustable full-size L/4 groundplane) + ZS6BKW dipole 20m
above ground
What a blast!
After my nice IOTA DXpedition QRP result last year [1] I decided to search for
another nice IOTA QTH early this year already and being bound to German holidays
at the moment it nicely fitted with our family holiday schedule, too. ;-) Again
Airbnb came to rescue and I found an excellent villa in Crete's northwest which
was reasonably priced as well.
So with an excellent location up on a hill, an almost unobstructed view to
central Europe at least, sloping ground for 200 m into the main direction and an
adjustable L/4 groundplane for 20-10 m as well as my trusty ZS6BKW dipole on 10m
fibre pole, both mounted up high on a rooftop terrace (see some pictures at
[2]), what else was needed to put in a good result? A highly motivated operator,
of course! And I was! ;-)
My goal was to maybe do some 800 QSOs after 660 last year as I hoped the SV9/
prefix would give an additional advantage over my MM/ callsign last year. On the
other hand there are quite a number of locals active on Crete so demand would
maybe be not as high as I wished. But it turned out there where not many on CW
so that certainly was another plus for my tiny QRP signal. 8-)
Condx in general were not as good as during the week before the contest due to a
proton storm. So not as many DX stations as I had hoped for. We had some good ES
openings on 10 m but activity was very low so not worth spending much time
there. 80 m didn't play well from here. There were thunderstorms in central
Europe and I was just too far away from the activity centers with my tiny QRP
signal. So didn't spend much time there either.
I reached the 660 QSOs from last year after 12 hours already, wow! But I had no
idea how I was doing for points as I had my logger configured wrongly. It
thought I was a mainland station, sorrily you can't change that in the current
log in RUMlog on MacOS and I didn't want to fiddle with log export and import
during the contest so it was all about just continuing and doing as good as I
can (I did import the log in N1MM+ on a virtual Windows machine afterwards to do
the right math for the results above). I reached my goal of 800 QSOs Sunday
morning but it really got slow afterwards with just 20-30 QSOs per hour. With
900 QSOs in the log and just a little over 2 hours to go I thought I would not
be able to even reach the 1.000 as a new goal but what followed were excellent
runs on 15 m. So I even did almost 1.100 QSOs (last QSO number was 1.089, yes a
few dupes in the log, got spotted wrongly once).
Would I have believed this was possible with just 5 watts and simple antennas?
Probably not! But the more happy I am. ;-)
Now looking forward to what the result is good for. ;-)
73, Olli - SV9/DH8BQA
References:
[1] MM/DH8BQA IOTA 2022:
https://www.dh8bqa.de/mm-dh8bqa-iota-test-from-eu-123-isle-of-arran/
[2] SV9/DH8BQA IOTA 2023 photos:
https://www.dh8bqa.de/a-few-sv9-dh8bqa-iota-2023-pictures/
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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