12/14/2007 | IK1UWL IK1UWL, I1ANP
Great partecipation, exciting, the best ARRL eme contest of the last years, and perigee helped a lot, signals arrived at surprisingly high levels and so we worked a lot of small stations. Both weekends were characterized by very deep libration fading, with period from half to several minutes, which in CW caused disappearance of signals for some periods, and in Digi pushed them near the threshold of decodibility. Faraday changed very slowly, with long periods of V pol rx (easily managed with cross yagis) followed by equally long periods of predominantly H pol rx.
We operated single band, mixed, multi op, assisted.
Why mixed? EME was born with CW, and we chose to continue this mode in a contest toghether with the presently more popular and effective mode, digital (thanks K1JT).
Why multi op? We used two receivers for monitoring the two sections of the band and switched mode and operator at the best moments.
Why assisted? Qsos are made with stations calling cq. And presently calling cq is fruitless without self-spotting, particularly in digi mode. So we operated 70% of the time calling cq and self-spotting every 5 minutes. In this way we worked many small stations, one or two yagis, a few hundred watts. We believe that the very high participation was tied to admitting, at least partially, self-spotting.
Many will not send the log because self-spotting was not admitted for all types of participation, we hope the organizers will consider this for future editions.
We operated full time both weekends, which in Europe meant skipping sleep, but it repayed us with 204 digi qsos and 20 cw qsos, total 224 qsos and 77 multi. -- IK1UWL