12/21/2009 | IZ1BPN Hello EME folks,
thanks a lot for this nice event once more. We finally spent not so much time trying to win the contest itself since we had, as usual, a lot of people visiting our shack during both legs. This means for us many hours spent in public relations instead of to the CW keyer but since there were also many students, from university down to youngest primary school children, I continue to consider it more important respect the final results of the contest itself.
Not so much activity from States side and we missed also VK guys for reduced window to them, due to relative not optimum Moon rise position respect to some hill we have to east direction...we will pay more attention to them next time, sorry!
We placed the SSPA at the tower base for the second leg and the effect of 30% of TX power more at the feed are easily audible. We are still working at the feed system in order to produce an easy and fast system to replace the 23cm feed with the 21cm one we use for radio-astronomy. After that I will spend some time to the feed position optimization, just to be able to hear weaker stations calling us.
Thanks especially to all small stations called us without obtaining reply: try again, we are doing our best to hear more and more...

Best 73 from IZ1BPN gang: IK1MTZ (Diego), IK1EGC (Daniele), IK1HWG (Maurizio), IK1YWB (Marcello), IW1AZJ (Silvio), IW1GLM (Mattia) and IZ1BPN (Stefano). -- IZ1BPN