A contest weekend without rain is that a real contest?  I believe not. This time a little group started on friday afternoon to prepare the antenna setup. We did not manage to get up the 8 x 6ele on friday. During the night we were glad that we did not. A storm nearly blew our tent away!  On saturday it was still so windy that we had to wait till eleven to put up the antenna. Everything was running really early, more than two hours before the contest. After using the TR-144 Transverter by DB6NT in a sub regional contest in April we used it for the first time in a 24 hour contest. Excellent! No problems with the device. But QRM situation is mostly not that bad here and there were no strong signals from the Rhön (JO40XL and JO50AN). This time the problems came from a direction we never had a problem to: Taunus. It took us long the realize that DL0HG was having a far to high phase noise. If our antennas pointed to each other the noise floor at our location raised to S5 (50km distance). No DX was possible with that. Telling them what was wrong they started discussing. That can not be true! This is a usual phenomena when using a transceiver like a FT-100, IC-706 or FT-847. The phase noise of the phase locked loop (PLL) is that high that it often causes interference at high signal levels. If even an amplifier is used the noise is amplified. That's bad for being QRV 24 hours from a good location.
Beside there were also positive impressions! It took a while till we believed a call by EB1DMI/p from IN63. Excellent contact over 1400km. Some other rare squares in our log are IN97, IN98 and JN84. Conditions got better with the weather on sunday but still very unstable. Activity was not bad, especially from France. We missed some OKs and beside G7RAU we did not work anyone from the UK. Activity seems to be really low if there is no local contest. Anyway we reached the second best result from that location every with the most QSOs we every did in 24 hours. Good job.  All that with some failures. Hardest was the failure of the rotator for the 4*6ele after about two hours. Fixing was not possible so we could only turn this antenna by "armstrong". Another problem was a Bird power meter that did not show any reading. A check after the contest showed that soldering material was in the connector! An excellent short (See picture).  If we connected it the other way we would have realized.
All together we had a lot of fun that weekend and came back home save.
 
 
 

Impressions:

DK0TR at sunrise on sunday - same antennas during the past year	our setup: 8 x 6ele and 4 x 6ele DJ9BV homebrew	THE BIG ONE - 8 times 6 element DJ9BV
operating: 1st OP: DJ0WW, 2nd OP: DK7CM	Wolf, DL4FCS, scanning the band for competitors	operating: 1st OP: DF8ZH, 2nd OP: DL3ZAL
antenna setup with DJ8OG and DL3ZAL	How could this happen??  N-jack of a Bird powermeter.	sunrise on sunday at 4UTC
	the team: DK7CM, DJ0WW, DL3ZAL, DL4FCS, DF8ZH, DJ8OG, DK1CM (from left to right)

Those are the squares we reached:
 

2m

TACLOG -reportfile - 2m

Contest Report from DK0TR in JO40QL at 144 MHz
==============================================

Contest : DARC VHF Wettbewerb
Date    : 2003 May 03 to 2003 May 04
Section : Single
QTH     : Hadrianstrasse 10
        : 63674 Altenstadt

Co-OPs  : DF8ZH;DJ0WW;DJ8OG;DK1CM;DK7CM;DL3ZAL;DL4FCS;DL6ZBN

TX      : TS-850 + Transverter, 600 W
RX      : TS-850 + Transverter 1dB NF
Antenna : 8x6ele + 4x6ele DJ9BV, 15 mAGL, 500 mASL
Log     : TACLog by OZ2M, 1,995, http://www.qsl.net/oz2m

QSOs    :  972
-invalid:    0                                       Points/valid QSO
-valid  :  972     QSO-points (*1)    :    292311                 301
WWLs    :   92     WWL bonus (0)      :         0                   0
DXCCs   :   19     DXCC bonus (0)     :         0                   0
                   ------------------------------              ------
                   Total score        :    292311                 301

ODX     : EB1DMI/P in IN63XM at 1398 km

Worked World Wide Locators:
IN63:   1   JN37:  13   JN63:   2   JN88:   9   JO33:  14   JO62:  26   
IN97:   1   JN38:   6   JN65:   7   JN89:   9   JO40:  59   JO63:   3   
IN98:   1   JN39:  14   JN66:   1   JN95:   1   JO41:  28   JO64:   5   
IO90:   1   JN44:   1   JN67:   3   JN97:   2   JO42:  31   JO65:   5   
JN08:   2   JN45:   6   JN68:  14   JN98:   5   JO43:  24   JO70:  18   
JN09:   3   JN46:   1   JN69:  23   JN99:  10   JO44:   6   JO71:   7   
JN14:   1   JN47:  22   JN75:   5   JO10:  11   JO46:   1   JO72:   4   
JN18:  10   JN48:  26   JN76:   5   JO11:   4   JO50:  56   JO73:   3   
JN19:   8   JN49:  50   JN77:   3   JO20:  10   JO51:  36   JO74:   2   
JN25:   2   JN54:   5   JN78:   5   JO21:  13   JO52:  23   JO80:   9   
JN26:   2   JN55:   2   JN79:  16   JO22:   7   JO53:  14   JO81:   5   
JN27:   2   JN56:   1   JN84:   1   JO23:   3   JO54:  10   JO82:   1   
JN28:   2   JN57:   6   JN85:   3   JO30:  22   JO55:   1   JO83:   1   
JN29:   4   JN58:  28   JN86:   4   JO31:  52   JO60:  30   JO90:   3   
JN34:   3   JN59:  18   JN87:   3   JO32:  14   JO61:  31   JO91:   1   
JN36:   5   JN62:   1   

Worked DXCCs:
9A  :   6   G   :   1   I   :  25   OK  :  90   OZ  :   4   SM  :   4   
DL  : 638   HA  :   6   LX  :   1   OM  :  14   PA  :  29   SP  :  15   
EA  :   1   HB  :  29   OE  :  16   ON  :  28   S5  :  12   YU  :   1   
F   :  52   

Top 10 QSO-points:
20030504 1130 EB1DMI/P       59   902 59   136        IN63XM     1398 
20030504 0351 YZ4IZ          59   632 59   210        JN84UN      907 
20030503 2049 IK0DDP/6       55   429 59   147        JN62OW      888 
20030504 0526 9A1O           52   660 59   165        JN95IT      865 
20030503 2348 F4LJW          51   563 59   040        IN97LI      836 
20030503 1652 9A4C           59   222 59   135        JN85RJ      826 
20030504 0900 HG6Z           59   807 59   267        JN97WV      815 
20030504 1156 HG7KLF         55   915 59   195        JN97WW      813 
20030503 2313 I5PVA/6        59   539 59   303        JN63GN      806 
20030503 2219 F2EE/P         59   495 59   087        JN14VM      784 

73

Oliver Prinz, DK1CM