After many problems with getting my 3cms transverter working for the October contest (most of my problems being mechanical or trying to source components), the actual contest lacked any catastrophes. My last job on the transverter was replacing the front end device which had died, a replacement from DB6NT arriving on the Wednesday. Unfortunately not being able to hear any signals on 3cms from home, I was relying on the pre-contest period for testing and potentially making last minute modifications.

The contest was being run by the Winterthur Radio Club (about 20kms from Zurich) from near the top of mount Säntis in the eastern part of Switzerland in JN47QG, near to Liechtenstein. The top of the mountain is 2500m (8200 ft) ASL, and at that height the air is thinner than at the bottom, a fact that soon becomes apparent as soon as you try and exert yourself. Because of the inaccessibility of the summit, all of the equipment had to be carried by hand to the operating location via the cable car. This limited us to relatively small antennas and medium power levels, but the location made up for it to a large extent. The picture to the right shows the members of the group, from the left they are, HB9JNX, HB9DKZ, HB9BHW, HB9/G4KLX, HB9AHD and HB9LE. HB9LE didn't actually operate he came up to provide some moral support at the beginning of the contest. One of the problems of the site, apart from access, is that there is a large Swisscom mast on top of the mountain. On 2m and 70cms it can cause problems with overloading and filters have to be used on those bands. Thankfully on 23, 13 and 3 no such precautions were needed.

The weather on the Saturday was glorious, and it brought out the crowds. The cable car up to the summit was full, and we got funny looks from people because of all the seemingly strange equipment we had. Everyone else had walking sticks and other mountain type gear. The other problems with having lots of people around was the interest that we aroused from the general public, ranging from an American who thought we were CB'ers to others who pointed at our equipment, said something in German and laughed, very annoying.

From the operating position we had an amazing view. Germany to the North was laid out to see on the opposite side of Lake Constance, and the mountains of Austria were nearby. One thing that has to be remembered is that mountains are dangerous, proper clothes and good footgear must be worn. About 10m from the operating position was an old fence that stopped you from falling over 1000ft ! The fence can be seen in the picture on the right.

We set the 3cms equipment up quickly as it was completely independent from the other stations (23cms and 13cms, no 70cms), the first thing we heard was the beacon DB0HO in JN47QT about 60kms away, extremely loud. We then found the beacon DK4GD in JN47FW at 100kms, also very loud, this seemed to show that the receive side was fine after all. I took the opportunity in the few hours before the contest started to take some tourist type photographs, and buy some postcards.

The callsign used on 10GHz was HB9JNX and because I'm not a member of USKA I didn't actually operate, as I was uncertain of the validity of my operating in the contest. However I did supply technical assistance and was on hand for all the QSO's on 3cms. As an aside, Swiss amateurs do not have to sign /P when operating portable, it is merely optional. Another thing worth remembering is that Swiss amateurs are not allowed to transmit on 2320MHz, instead they are allowed to transmit on 2308MHz and must therefore work "crossband" on 13cms. The 3cms operating position on Saturday was outside of the shack, next to the antenna, with the radio and logbook (more like a piece of paper) resting on chairs. Although this wasn't ideal, it did allow for easy access to the antenna for pointing and of course we could admire the views when things were quiet.

Our first QSO was with HB9CZF/P in JN47DG at 82kms, with 59's both ways. The best QSO on Saturday was with OK1KRQ/P in JN69HN at 350kms, signals were very strong and it was a very easy QSO. All of the contacts on 3cms on Saturday were made via schedules arranged on one of the lower bands. All of our stations closed at midnight due to the lack of activity. By that time we had made six QSO's on 3cms. This was very encouraging, although conditions were poor on all bands.

We were back at our operating positions at 7am on Sunday. The weather had now changed, heavy rain was falling and the temperature had dropped considerably. The 3cms operating position was now set up in the shack with the cables going through a hole in the wall, the problem with this arrangement was antenna pointing. But once it was set up, we found that the band was full of auroral sounding signals, I knew that this was Rain Scatter and we started to work as many people as possible. The nice fact that RS spreads the signal over a wide range of angles meant that antenna positioning was much simplified.

Until we closed down at midday, we made another nine QSO's on 3cms. Almost all of them were via RS and only one was scheduled via 23cms or 13cms, the others were made by listening and calling on 3cms directly. For someone who used to work Auroras on 2m I didn't find it too strange to listen to, although I could not understand why stations wanted to move to SSB from CW as soon as the QSO had started. During our time on 3cms we only lost one QSO and that was with a very weak station on RS who simply faded out. We didn't even get so far as getting a complete callsign from him.

The decision to close down at midday had been taken quite early and it turned out to be a good one. Snow had started to fall and the wind had started to increase. By the time we got to the cable car to go down, the weather information was showing an outside temperature of -2C and a wind speed of 60kms/h. The cable car stops operating once the speed goes above 90kms/h and we didn't want to spend the rest of the day and the following night up there.

Overall the contest was a lot of fun, there were no equipment failures on any band, and 3cms had turned out to be a joy to operate on. The transverter worked impeccably for the whole time and we all learned about the new band (to us). If I could change anything about the contest, they would be to have taken 70cms, and dropped 13cms due to the amount of equipment needed. Also to have had access to the Packet Cluster network as a lot of 3cms spots were on the system which would have been useful to us, as it would have given us the ability to advertise ourselves, and be more aware of other stations active on the band(s).

For the record our stations were:

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank DB6NT for producing such lovely microwave equipment, his home page is http://www.db6nt.com, and for sending me the replacement front end HEMT at short notice, I would also like to thank Lorenz DL6NCI for providing useful information (like a proper 10GHz beacon list) and for contacting DB6NT about my blown HEMT. I would also like to thank the Winterthur group for letting me come with them during the contest and sharing their food, drink and conversation with me.

For those who want to see what we worked, the complete 3cms logbook follows. The operating times for all stations was from 1400 to 1800 and 1900 to 2200 on the Saturday, and from 0500 to 1030 on the Sunday. All times in UTC.

Last updated on 30.11.2003