This weekend I entered the Hungarian DX contest. A fun contest, 160 – 10 m in SSB and CW. Nice way to test my new antenna position (although not really different from the old one). There where noticeably less stations active with voice then in CW. My target was a minimum of 100 Q’s voice and 100 Q’s CW. Turned out I wasn’t even able to work 100 Q’s voice (98). CW Q’s could have been a lot more if I had stayed in that mode. More and more I dislike the voice mode for contesting. It’s loud, very wide signals, hard to copy and even harder to get copied (with some stations). Every now and the I switched back to CW and it’s just a warm bath. Every station I hear, I’m able to work. Almost every time on first try. For the division league I need to be active in voice as well, but I’m seriously considering to go CW and RTTY only for contesting.
10 meter was kind of open, but a little disappointing in score. 160 meters is just a steady S7/S8 QRM and I can only copy the strongest signals. My 2x 13,75 meter antenna as a bit small for good efficiency on this band; good noticeable in my score. But, I worked all bands! And that’s a good thing.
Tag: Veron
Losing division league 2013
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.
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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! 😉
New club housing
I’m a member of the national radio club Veron. Every region in the Netherlands has its own department which are coordinated centrally from Veron Headquarters. Based on your address you’re member of that region (I guess this is the way it works in every country). Because I’m living in Hilversum I’m member of Veron department ‘t Gooi.
A few years ago the old clubhouse burned down and since then ‘t Gooi was located in a temporary location above a local primary school. Needless to say the location was not ideal of course.
But the last two months there were very cool things going on. We’ve got an offer to move in a new location: the old NERA-building. The NERA-building is a pretty old building that was used for radio communications with Indonesia back in the days Indonesia was still a colony of the Netherlands. The location was chosen for it’s perfect soil conditions for radio.
Of course this would be the perfect place for a radio club to have their clubhouse!
So we’re in the new locations for a few weeks now. Enjoying all the space! Last evening (every tuesday is our get-together-evening) we had a meeting about what antenna’s there should build, how the clubhouse must be decorated, should or shouldn’t we have a bar, etc. It’s nice to be member of a club were all the members are active, enthusiastic and there are some financial means to do something! I will post some pictures of the new location asap!