IARU 2019!!

Some think that the year starts on the first of January and finishes at midnight at 31 December...

My year starts right after the IARU contest and ends with the next one.


As every year after a few months of preparations, new antennas considerations, endless discussions which antenna will be better for current propagation conditions I have approached (on Thursday before the contests) to my farmer land near Mettmenstetten (as always many thanks dear Mr Müller for my contest place).

The weather forecast was promising - no storms, not too much rain (forecasts...), no heat wave as week before (can't imagine building the antenna farm with 37 Celsius degrees).

The field was ready. This time there were even not too many "land mines" left for me by cows what used to be the case every year  :))

I started with the most complicated antenna - Spiderbeam. It usually takes most of the time - even with improvements that I have made for quicker setup it takes a lot of time. The 15 meters alu mast requires 3 levels of ropes. Pigs are bigger than for other fiberglass masts and need to be fixed with hammer.

To protect the coax against rain I used to cover it with isolation tape. This year I have printed (on the 3d printer) plastic tubes - one of them was glued to the balun box (outer) and the other one (inner) was inserted and secured in the outer one. This way the rain should not penetrate the plugs/coax without the horrible isolation tape.

At the end of the day I was able to lift the antenna to the height of 10 meters.

On the next day - Friday - I got some help from my wife - Ela. Together we were able to lift the mast additional 5 meters so the Spiderbeam landed on the final height - 15m.

The weather forecast proved that forecast is just forecast and nothing more...

Luckily the rains were just visiting me from time to time and finally the antenna farm was ready for the contest. I had the following antennas: spiderbeam (40, 20, 15, 10), inverted V (80, 40), GP (80,40), 5/8 (20), vertical delta (40), Windom (42m length for all bands)

On the contest day (Saturday) I came in the morning with all the equipment for the station. I remembered last year when when contest started my notebooks showed nice "blue screen" and I had to suddenly use the second one that I incidentally took with me. This year I had nearly everything doubled (radio, notebook, etc) but in the moment of starting of the contest everything was working fine.

Unfortunately not until end...  ;)

The contests started as usual with high traffic on higher bands (start at 14:00 local time when sun is high on the sky). The 15 and 10m bands were open and I was jumping 20-15-10... for the first hours.
I was especially interested in one of my new antennas - 5/8 for 20 meters. It was a new "toy in my garden" and was quite useful on 20m. Sometimes I was calling via this antenna and only if had no response I was switching to Spiderbeam and pointed it to desired direction. In the evening around 20:00 I noticed that the 5/8 is sometimes even better than the Spiderbeam even pointed into the corespondent direction. This was somehow strange - the best omnidirectional antenna should rather not outperform the 3 elements beam. Then I discovered that my Spiderbeam which should look like this:

actually looks like....

It was 20:00 (8pm), many stations on 20m, expected traffic to both Americas in next 2..3 hours and I have no basic antenna. Disaster.
I was considering continuing with the remaining antennas or try to repair this (whatever happened). Finally this is really best antenna I have for higher bands (and the only one for 15 and 10m) so I decided to put it down, try to repair and put it up again to maximum height I will be able to (remember full height required 2 persons).

When the antenna landed on the ground I discovered this:

The plastic element that I introduced for quicker assembly of the antenna had broken...
I did some workaround with a piece of rope.

Unfortunately the repair took around 2 hours so I was erecting the mast in the darkness. This also killed my Windom antenna because it was too dark to raise it.
But around 22:00 local time I was "back in business" and did some contacts with both Americas in the night hours.

On Sunday contest finished at 14:00. Heinz HB9BPH joined me to help in the station disassembling. Many thanks again Heinz!

Finally I have made around 280 contacts (310 last year) and got 80k points (last year 100k). Maybe these missing are just from the time when I was working on the antenna.

So now the new year started :) Need to fix the Spiderbeam and consider which antennas to use.

73!