Wednesday, March 30, 2016

PACC 2016 with YNOMY

Studies have taken a lot of my spare time the last 12 months, so there is not a lot of radio news to share. I did however participate in PACC 2016 contest with the YNOMY crew.

We participated with the special call PA55A from the same camping ground we used in 2015. That year we finished second and were comfortably warm during the contest (as opposed to our first attempt in 2014) - good reasons to go back to the friendly camping owners. Although they look at us warily when they see us struggling setting up all those wires in rain and wind, we are most welcome to use their grounds.

The setup we used was comparable to 2015 with separate wire antenna's for 160m, 80m and 40m - using three fiberglass poles - and a hexbeam for 20m, 15m and 10m. We used one radio and a small solid state amplifier that gave us about 300w peak on most bands.

Another thing that was comparable to last year and the year before was the weather. It was cold, windy with some rain and snow. The pictures below give you an impression of the state the field was in.

It does look like we did well. We learnt our lessons from our attempts in 2014 and 2015. The preliminary results (from the log robot) place us in #1. Not bad at all. Now we have to keep our fingers crossed that we did not make any major mistakes. Last year we had very few errors. So let's hope the contest turns out to be comparable to last year on this level as well.

Muddy field - probably good for the reflection of waves though....


In the end everything was covered in mud - not just the shoes