Tag: Contests

Posts related to contests, on air competitions.

Posted on
by

The ARRL of the Netherlands is called the VERON. The organization is grouped into different regions. Every region has its own members. To promote the participation of contests the VERON does organize a division league between the different regions. When you participated in a contest, you submit your Q’s on a website and the every year there is a overall winner but also a region winner.

In my region Wilko PA3BWK wins for years in a row now. I know Wilko and consider him a friend. He has a spotless reputation in contesting. When Wilko wants to win, he will win, no matter what. But this year Wilko had a very busy year involving a big move etc. So he couldn’t spend as much time contesting as he wanted. I did see this reflecting his low score during 2013. At some point I decided to take a shot at the league and try to defeat Wilko. As you readers might noticed, I reported about quite a few contest participation’s over the last months. I didn’t blog about this subject on purpose to not reveal my strategy/intentions to Wilko. Unfortunately for me Wilko did recover on time and we had a great battle the last few contests. Tuesday 17 December the deadline for the division league closed and all scores are calculated. Turns out I lost from Wilko:

Afdelings Resultaat in de VERON Competitie.
==============================================

1. PA3BWK                 70                38.8 %
2. PA1JIM                   61                 33.8 %
3. PA3CJP                   42                  23.3 %
4. PA3EER                  4                    2.2 %
5. PA3FYG                   3                    1.6 %

Totaal score: 180

And again a marvelous example of the determination of Wilko PA3BWK. Even in the last weeks of the division league he was able to turn a lag of multiple points on me around in a lead and win the league with no less then 9 points!!
All I can do is being humble, take the second place and congratulate Wilko PA3BWK for this spectacular victory.
Wilko: thanks for a great achievement. I did everything to keep you behind me, but you beat me fair and square: congrats!
Hopefully we’ll meet again next year in the division league of 2014! 😉

Posted on
by

Field DayA while ago Mark, PA4M and I planned a ‘field day’ of our own. Last Sunday would be the day if the rain wasn’t too strong. We picked a spot near the Gooimeer in the center of the Netherlands. We were in the middle of some farmers land. Mark did bring his homebuilt end fed for 20m and I bring a 1:10 MFTF-balun with the same 10 meter of wire as the end fed. This way we could compare both antennas.
Also I did bring the BuddiPole for it’s first run on new mast and tripod.

The IARU-contest was still going strong, so after setup the antennas and my Kenwood TS-590 rig Mark gave the key a spur and kicked 57 contacts in the log. Pretty nice when you take the bad conditions in consideration.

Too bad we didn’t hear any USA/Asia/Oceania. But after all a great day to be outside and testing our equipment!

Posted on
by

PA1JIMLast weekend another edition of the Dutch PACC contest was active on the bands. Every year it is an exciting time around the second weekend of february. This year for me it extra exciting because as new contestmanager of clubstation PI4RCG. A few months ago I had the idea to build a simple multi-multi-station at our NERA club facility. Just 5 seats with a few wire antenna’s. It turn out to be much more work then I aspected. Continue reading →