Burzenin 2018

I managed to visit the yearly Polish Amateur Radio Community meeting in Burzenin. It is considered as "Technical Meeting" devoted mostly to technical aspects of our hobby. Filled with prelections, presentations and demonstrations gives many new ideas for new antennas, trx and others. I always meet many interesting people here, some old and new friends...

IARU 2018

As every year more or less after publication of IARU results I start to think about current year IARU contest. It gives me around 4 months for preparations.

Last year I was not happy with my vertical delta for 40 meters. This year I need some smart 40m antenna - the propagation is far from fantastic on higher bands so the lower bands (160,80,40) are even more important. 

During the Friedrishafen Ham Radio I bought the new 40m element for the Spiderbeam antenna. A few weeks before contest I managed to assemble the new element and do basic tests. The results were promising. So this will be my antenna for 40m this year.

For 80m I will use the GP (based on Spiderbeam 18m fiber glass mast) and I decided to build a 80m horizontal delta (on 4 mast support so not delta but some loop). 

As addition I will setup two end fed antennas (40m each) positioned 90 degrees to each other. 

So finally I will have Spiderbeam for 40,20,15,10 bands, GP and horizontal delta for 80m and two end feds for all bands as backup. Will have possibility to compare all these antennas.

Preparations

2 weeks before contest I visited my farmer (Hr Müller) and agreed the date of the contest. Mr Müller gives me one of his fields for a few days contest.

I started preparations on Thursday. As usually I built the Spiderbeam first. This time I had huge help from Heinz HB9BPH in erecting the antenna to full 15m (on alu mast). It is especially important for the new 40m element which "likes" to be possibly high.

On Friday I erected GP, delta and two end feds. 

On Saturday morning I built a special balun for delta (tnx Ziggi DL1GLO). Started in the morning with building the station in the car. Finally at 2pm was ready to start...

At 2:01pm I sow the following screen on my notebook:

What is interesting - I tested this notebook a week before contest, a day before and finally an hour before. Everything was working. In the moment of contest start - blue screen. I lost around 30 minutes trying to bring it lo life and then I had to give up - luckily I had another one with me so after switching them I started the contest.

Unfortunately the spare one had only one USB port when I need two (one for radio and one for the rotator). Then I had to use a USB hub which was not working perfectly - from time to time the N1MM program was loosing connection to the radio. Probably due to this issue I have some QSO logged incorrectly (band). I hope that not many of them are wrong but some for sure. Lesson learned from this contest - buy good USB hub...

This was the first time that I had so many antennas. I didn't do any special statistics but my impression is that higher bands (20 and up) was 100% covered by spiderbeam and on the lower bands I was sometimes on the delta and sometimes on the GP. I have even impression that GP was usually slightly better than delta (remember that delta is much more difficult to erect - 4 masts, 80 meters long). Next year maybe I will build dedicated GP for 40m. This is still one of the most important bands as propagation on higher is still far from fantastic. 

The contest finished on Sunday 2pm (local time). Then together with Heinz HB9BPH we disassembled the station and all antennas. This was the first time in last 10 years that I had some help and that was really great. Heinz -> huge THANK YOU. Please feel like invited for next year contest as well :)))))