[UK-CONTEST] Not IOTA or UBN's

[Dave]

At 12:08 04/08/2011, John Lemay wrote:

Interesting report John, I guess the organisers forgot to check the 
proximity of the Sun or they wouldnt have set the contest last weekend.
Good result under the circumstances.

Dave G4RGK
>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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