12/24/2006 | SZ1A When Dimitris SV1CIB told me to run the 10m contest, i thought he is crazy. But after some thought i told myself why not. So we went in a mountain close to our city (abt 950m high)where i have a house. It was like a field day because we hadn't a rotor to turn the antenna and we assembled all (including antenna) the Friday! Antenna was a 4el quad but the swr was too high on cw (3:1). We borrowed a tuner and after all we were on the air Saturday morning. What a dissapointment. We could hear 3-4 stations and that's all. Spyros SV1JMO and me (SV1DPI) blamed Dimitris. Why you told us to run this damned contest? We were calling cq abt 1 hour and no replies! But after the noon the band changed. It was much better. Finally we went to sleep after 2300 local hour! The band was open for us until then! Mainly Europe and a lot of EA8's, no JA, no W's but the band was open! Yes it was nice. Next morning the band was not better but our soul was the best! We worked many Europeans agn and we had a good opening in afternoon. Late afternoon we worked the first USA station. It was K4RV from SC. After that we worked some more W's but
all from FL. We really enjoyed the contest, even it was in the bottom of the cycle. Many stations gave us numbers like 001 to 005. We are sure that many of them confused our call especially on cw where they thought us like hz1a, iz1a, uz1a, s71a and who knows what else.... We identified our selves almost in every qso. Our call was SZ1A. SZ prefix is what the ministry gives to Greek clubs. That's why the SZ... Tnx to all who worked us. Very soon our log will be on
LotW. Qsls also ok via buro or direct in qrz.com address. We want to thanks also Cristopher SW1HKX, Apostolos SW1JMF, Dimitris SV1SN and Kostas SV1CQN, who helped us a lot.

Best 73
a part of SZ1A team
SV1CIB, SV1DPI, SV1JMO)

PS. We missed the company of SV1BJW, SV1ELF and SV1JMC who were in our initial plans... Next time guys...

Equipment

yaesu ft1000mp mark-v field

icom pw1

4el LBA quad with Dimitris (hi hi) rotor -- SV1DPI