October 2021: Stolen victory

With the good result from last year we were eager to improve it and become fully operational on all bands this time.

We now owned the mast lorry, had found big support from Frieder DC5SI where we could park it and store some other material, and got more experienced with the handling of the mast. The antenna configuration was the same as 2020, but this time including the 6 cm band transverter. We started with the antenna setup on Friday morning, with good progress - first the masttop with three stacks of 6x9 ele for 70cm:

Next are the two 6x23 ele stacks for 23cm:

Then the swivel-mounted crane which holds both dishes - the 1.5 m dish for 13 cm and 6 cm hanging down:

And finally the 1 m dish for 3 cm which rides on top of the other arm of the crane:

Both dishes can be mounted while standing on the lorry's roof

Below the dishes we finally mount the two 23 cm Quados (YU1AW) antenna stacks, each 6 x Quados6, fixed direction, which cover most of DL and adjacent countries permanently.

With perfect weather we were able to finish the whole setup in a record time, and the mast was fully extended before the sun had set

The water cooler with a new pump for the 70 cm PA worked, too.

So we had happy operators:

During the weekend the weather stayed dry though not so sunny anymore. We could start in time, with 4 stations in parallel, and most equipment worked smoothly. Only 23 cm struggled, because one of the preamps had failed which made the yagi stack on the west side unusable. Apologies to stations who may have called us from France, we were completely deaf. We found out later that it was just a broken solder joint at the source resistor which blocked the current through the ATF33143.

Alex DL2GWZ made big points on 13 cm and 6 cm while Stefan DL2OBC and Michael DK7UX cared for the catering.

The contest was a full success! Takedown needed nearly 5 h so that we could start home at 21 h.

Raw results:

432MHz:
1296 MHz:
2320 MHz:
5760 MHz:
10 GHz:
24 GHz:

Aftermath

After the claimed scores were out, we were very happy to have seemingly won 2.3 GHz and 5.7 GHz, possibly 432 MHz, and with quite a large margin and for the first time the overall section. But we were wrong. IARU has cheated us. Someone had decided to change the rules in a way that declassifies stations from winning a section if they did not send in their logs within 34 h after the end of the contest, while the general deadline was still more than a week, as it had been before. Nearly nobody was informed about this rule change. The IARU-R1 had just updated a new PDF document to the old link without any notice on their web site where you can download the rules, and the DARC has even kept the misleading old rules on their web site until September 2022. As far as we know, there was not information on any web site or ham radio publication about it.

While this rule change by itself is an expression of distrust and dislike from the IARU comitee to the leading contest stations, the non-information policy is just underhand practice. Obviously some comitee members hate the leading contest stations for whatever reason.

The results of the 2021 UHF IARU contest in detail (multi-OP only):

If you may wonder why all of the "false winners" are from OK and OM: the CRC VHF manager had sent out a warning mail to many stations on monday after the contest to inform them last minute about the rule change. Not to OK2A, obviously, as they are not CRC members.

Do you think it is a fair competition if out of 6 stations who won by points only 2 may have been informed about the new disqualification rule? (YR7J may have just been lucky, OL4A got the info) While the others get punished and disciplined for not downloading and very carefully reading the rules every year, after working hard for weeks and months to build, test and set-up their equipment?