During my stay in Ecuador I was able to operate two days under my US Callsign as HC2/AL1O. Special thanks to my host Alberto, HC2AQ who offered me his shack. Within two days, 1700 QSOs found their way into the log.
Read on for pictures, online log & QSL information.
it finally happend…. After a decade of reliable service, my Alpha91b amplifier broke. Most likely on it’s way to Spain one of the tubes broke. During the comissioning at ED1R contest station, fire & smoke shot out of a chimney. The first shock was big, but a few measurements confirmed that just the tubes were broken. In this blog post I will share the knowledge I gained during during debugging, comissioning and breathing new life into the amplifier.
This year I had to honor to be invited by the Qatar Amateur Radio Society (QARS) to operate the CQ WW SSB contest with them. The station set up in a fieldday style on the northern tip of Qatar, about 100km way from the capital Doha. We are directly located at the beach and used almost exclusively vertical antennas. A73A entered in the category Multi Operator / Multi Transmittors, running 6 Stations in parallel. Keep on reading for some pictures and lessons learned.
Do you own a Heil headset and have you ever wondered about the story behind Heil Sound? Then this might be of your interest!
While thinking about upgrading my sound equipment to a Heil PR-40 microphone I stumbled over a 15 minute long interview with Bob Heil, K9EID the founder and CEO of Heil Sound, which you should listen to. Continue Reading »
A few days ago I had the honor to be invited for dinner with the VP8ORK Microlite DX-Pedition Team. Before leaving from Ushuaia, southern Argentina towards the Islands of South Orkney the team assembled itself in Buenos Aires. Thanks to the LUCG (LU Contest Group) and especially the help of Claudio, LU7DW we had a fantastic barbecue in one of the famous “parrillas” of Buenos Aires. While writing this, the VP8ORK is already QRV. If you haven’t worked them yet, go and give them a call. Here are a few pictures of this evening:
A couple of days ago my friend & fellow contester Thomas, OZ1AA left Denmark on his bycicle towards the amazing destiny of Sydney, Australia. Thomas has currently reached the Ukraine. thomas will cycle through countries like Syria, India, Ethiopia, Sudan and Djibuti, just to name the most “interesting” ones.
Last weekend I was invited to speak at the Contest Universtity in Friedrichshafen, Germany. This year I tried to visualize a rather abstract topic, the influence of technologies on the art of contesting.
Mainly two topics are discussed: Information Management and Software Defined Radios.
Do you like this presentation? Please leave a comment and share your opinion with us!
The Contest Community has voted. Almost 500 contesters particpated in the survey on ARRL’s recent decisions. As promised, I’m providing the results one day after the survey’s end for further discussion. Some of the answers are very clear, other’s should be refined. However here are the results without any interpretation or censorship. Take them, build your opinion and share your thoughts with us!
Yesterday I received an overwhelming amount of replies on my personal opinion about ARRL’s IARU Contest decisions. Fellow contester agreed, disagreed and expressed their own opinions. The amount of replies is a proof that our contest community takes this discussion serious. However, it is unclear if these personal opinions are representative for our whole contest community. Now, I would like to take this Question on another level. I just created an Online-Survey / Poll. It takes less than two minutes to answer all Questions! Please participate and spread the word! Your vote counts!
The Survey can be accessed through this link:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/312520/ARRL-IARU-Contest-Decisions
The Survey will be online for three days until Tuesday, 15th of June 2010 – 23:59 UTC. I will publish the results the day after on Wednesday 16th of June.
