IOTA Contest, 26-27 July 2008

HB9CZF - SOAB LP 24h-CW assisted

Rig: K3, 100W, 3el SteppIR for 10-20m and 41m LW for 40-80m.

This was my first HF contest with DX-Cluster support. A few weeks ago I bought a wireless router from Swisscom which offers serveral 2nd and 3rd generation wireless protocolls on the WAN side and Ethernet & WLAN on the client side. With HSDPA I had roughly 1Mbps download throughput which is more than enough for a Telnet session to the PI4CC DX-Cluster. DX-Cluster assistance gets you lazy. You simply sit in the chair and wait for new multis to arrive. If you click quickly enough you are the first to arrive on the scene. Surprisingly I bumped into one DL station several time after a spot appeared. Nevertheless I was S&P-ing all bands up and down especially during the night when the supply of spots ceased.

The Spordic E open brought many QSO on the higher bands into the log and even W was worked on 15m. Nothing was heard from VK and ZL. Sunday morning KH6MB and WH6R (both OC-019) were S7 on 20m and W1AW/KL7 peaked up to S9. K9AJ/VY0 (NA-229) was heard Saturday afternoon but my 100W couldn't break the W-wall.

Overall I worked 15 new IOTA for the first time or I have no QSL-card received back: DT5A (AS-081); B7M/p (AS-129); B7P/7 (AS-131); GM3POI (EU-009); IF9/I3FDZ/p (EU-054); F/DL3OCH/p (EU-058); LA/OK4MM (EU-061); J48JJ, J48NL, JN48P, JN48PS (EU-072); OG4X (EU-096); EE1MI (EU-142); CQ2I (EU-150); TF/DJ2VO, TF/DL3PS (EU-168); ES8UD (EU-178); VX1RNS/p (NA-081); and C6APR (NA-113).

At 23:30z I tried to go the bed (sleeping bag) and while I was closing the shutters a sparrow was woken up and flew into my shack. With all light off he finally escaped to the dark forrest half an hour later ...

Claimed Score

 BAND   QSO DUP IOTA  POINTS   AVG 
-----------------------------------
   80    27   0   21     369 13.67 
   40    89   0   48    1095 12.30 
   20   109   0   69    1479 13.57 
   15    83   0   49    1065 12.83 
   10    26   0   13     282 10.85 
-----------------------------------
TOTAL   334   0  200    4290 12.84 
===================================
       TOTAL SCORE : 858 000

Operating time: 12h35

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