Contesting

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From the early days of my ham activity I liked very much participating in contests. Actually, I was joining the DLØFC contest team as second operator before being licensed.

The first years saw me mostly on 2m from locations around my home QTH near Frankfurt in the central part of Germany. Later, I went to various places more fare away, such as Luxemburg, the Champ-du-Feu mountain in the French Vosges mountains just for the contests, or for combined business trips with participations from various locations in Italy.

In 2m contests I usually was operating with an IC245 barefoot with 10W or with small power amplifiers of max. 80W. I tested various antenna systems, from 1x9 ele over 2x7 ele to maximum 2x13 ele. Resulsts were not so bad, but being low power with no separate category I did not end up under the Top Ten. Since many years I don't participate in 2m contests anymore, with my IC746 however I could run 100W into 2x7 ele - let's see when I will re-start my 2m activities.

Besides some "just-for-fun" participations in the big contests whenever time was available, I started in the early 2000s to operate from outside Germany with a little bit more success. Being first in my category in the country from where I worked, was usually not really a challenge, as in those categories there were no OM seriously participanting. However, I managed in some of the contests to be under the worldwide Top Ten of my participation category - but always still far (far) away from the points of the 1st place station......

My favorite contests are WPX, CQWW, WAG, WAEDX, REF, as you often come across new DXCC countries in those ones.

Anyway, I still enjoy it, and if the final result is better than the last time, I'm happy. Even though I'm asking myself after each and ever 36-40 hour contest "why the hell am I doing this?"  ;-))