[UK-CONTEST] Not IOTA or UBN's

[John Lemay]

Hello all

Just for a change from IOTA or other HF contest reports, here's my write-up
on last weekends Dubus 144MHz EME Digital Contest.

Once a year, the German Dubus magazine arranges an EME (moonbounce) contest
on 144MHz for an entire weekend. The "digital" bit of the title refers to
JT65 communication, which is part of the WSJT suite of programmes. JT65 is
ideal for modest stations like mine, which enables EME contacts to be made
with a back-yard system and without resource to high power permits. I have
four 8 element yagis in a box on a mini Versatower.

I hadn't done much EME work in the past few months, so part of Friday was
spent checking the system over, and in particular making sure that any
bleeps, burbles, hash and so on from my PC was at as low a level as
possible.

As it turned out, self-generated noise would be the least of my worries.

On Saturday morning the moon rose at around 5am. I did not. My first qso was
at around 7.30; a much more sociable hour. After making a few qso's with
some of the "big guns" like RU1AA (16 x 14 elements array), I realised that
my receiver was reading S5 on the meter. This isn't right at all, because
I've carefully tailored the system gain for hearing pre-amp noise, but not
seeing it. The problem turned out to be the sun: it was close to the moon in
azimuth and elevation - and it was being noisy. The suns activity came and
went throughout the weekend, and was a real chore at times. There were
periods of an hour without any qso's at all.

Sundays part of the contest was a little less noisy, and the qso's mounted
up. By sunset on Sunday I had completed 41 EME qsos for about 15 hours of
operating. That must sound unbelievably slow to some of the HF types here,
for whom 41 qsos in 1/2 hour would be disappointing, but each digital qso
via the moon takes around 10 minutes. I did a mixture of search and pounce
and calling cq. Contacts are often set up on a live discussion group,
because signals are just too weak to tune around and hope to find.

Final tally was 41 qsos, 39 prefix multipliers with a score of 1599. It's
more than double what I achieved last year but I'll still be looking at the
results table from the bottom up. DX included VK and JA but that's all
relative when the path is via the moon. 14 of the qso's were all-time new
stations for me, we call these first qso's "initials"

Gear is FT-847, LIV interface, GS35B amplifier and 4 x 8 ele JXX yagi,
MGF1302 masthead pre-amp. Nothing broke, failed or caught fire.


Regards

John G4ZTR


 

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