It was my 1st active participation in the ARRL EME Contest. We finished our final state of the planned 144 MHZ EME Station this spring and so i was keen to see how my station works during a contest. I am now working with 4x9ele XPOL antennas by DF7KF with Linrad and IQ+ reciever for adaptive polarisation reception.

I am very content with the result of 108 worked stations. It could have been some more, but i did not made it through to reach everyone i heard.

Some nice personal highlights happened in the contest with working four new DXCCs and some new squares and US-states.

Best of all was to work 9M2/JG3TTO with his QRP station. I was monitoring him a long time and never saw a single trace. But 5 degrees before his moonset the signal increased obviously with help of groundgain up to -22dB.

The 2nd part of the contest was very hard to operate here in central  EU. Dispite of many comments from EU stations in advance the date of the second leg of the EME contest was set in accordance with the very popular european Marconi CW contest. And the band was full with stations, also over the complete EME section between 144100-150 (See the picture of my MAP65 spectrum at around 17:00 UTC). The Input gain on my MAP65 was often over 60dB and so it was not usable most time during the CW Contest wich took place from Saturday 1400 UTC to Sunday 1400 UTC. I hope this will never happen again, even if the best Moon conditions are at this 1st weekend of November.

Nevertheless for me it was mostly of the time big fun to work all the stations throughout the world.

Vy 73 de Alex, DL1KDA