As every year, we joined the the Helvetia H26 contest. This year we participated in the MO SSB category. Due to the bad weather forecast for the weekend, we were not sure whether we should use the station of HB9ELV or if we should risk a the definitely colder weekend at the contest site of HB9EE :p
Since the weather forecast was excellent until Friday, Chris HB9ELV and I HB9EMP decided on Monday to build everything up at the HB9EE contest site during the remaining evenings. With the help of Peter HB9BUN we could do it very efficient and on Friday evening we were ready with all the antennas and just had to wire the shack (which was quite some fun :P). Finally all was tested and put in place. During the last couple of contests it showed us that we have all the problems regarding PA malfunction caused by power generator failure and the internet timeouts fixed. We were quite confident that the equipment will work and so the result was only a matter of HF propagation and skill 🙂
The Operators, HB9ELV HB9EMP and HB9BUN met at 1 o’clock on Saturday HB time to verify everything and to decide the strategy.
We started on time and had some acceptable rates until Sunday mid-morning. Starting on the high bands was the correct strategy. The propagation was quite good. USA was more or less always open either on 40m, 20m, 15m or 10m. JA was very strong, but somehow large pile-ups did not occur. We were also very happy that south cook, the Salomon island’s and other more or less rare countries called us.
It finally lead to a result of more than 1400 QSOs and a total of around 900’000 Points. Until the mid-morning of Sunday we thought that the million is maybe reachable but the rates descend more more towards the end of the contest.
Over the half of the QSOs were with NA. Thanks for this great participation from overseas! Unfortunately we just know the scores of two other station so we don’t know where we really are, but for sure our score is not too bad 😉
Congratulation to HB9CA breaking the 1 Mio. barrier 🙂 You guys have always an excellent operating and a good nose for the band openings 🙂
As every year the main competitor was HB9Z. We think you also reached a good score – congratulations! This year they used the special call HB90IARU which seemed to work out well. Our post-contest DX cluster analysis showed us that they got spotted a lot more than we got spotted 🙂 By the way we analysed all HB DX cluster entries for the period of the H26 contest and found some revealing results. We will not publish any of them since it is up to the contest director to decide whether first he wants to analyse this and second whether he wants to take some actions or not. We just analysed it because we already observed some interesting things going on and so we were interested what was happening precisely 🙂 And in fact we know now!
We also appreciated the excellent catering of Chris HB9ELV. It consisted of Snickers, Knoppers and boiled eggs (including mayonnaise and aromat). 🙂 But also a big thank you to Peter HB9BUN for offering some croissants on Sunday morning and his great support in general 🙂 We also want to thank Steve HB9FPS for his help on the antenna installation. HB2T is now also on Facebook. Feel free to hit the Like button on your right. By the way the all of the equipment survived and did a fine job and also the WX was not too bad. Some rain on Saturday evening/night but beside that it was dry.
We hope to reach you in the next contest!
Vy 73s
the operators of HB2T
The team of HB2T during the Helvetia H26 HF contest in 2015. HB9EMP ( doing the Mr. Spock salute in memories of Lenard Nimoy), HB9ELV and HB9BUN