Alpe Adria UHF Contest 2019

On Sunday, June 16, 2019, we could once again be heard on the band. This time we participated in the Alpe Adria UHF Contest, where we wanted to give away a few points on the 432 MHz band.

The contest is organised by the national radio amateur associations of Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. In June, the contest is organised on bands from 432 MHz and higher and in August, the race runs on the 144 MHz band. (Attention! The organisers moved the start of the race on the 144 MHz band an hour earlier, i.e. from 06:00 UTC to 14:00 UTC).

We wanted to test the 11 element DG7YBN antenna constructed by Dušan, OM3WAK. However, we had limited equipment on us and therefore the antenna was mounted on a speaker stand about 2.5 metres above the ground. As TRX we used a Kenwood TS2000 with a power of 50W.

We could hear only a minimum of stations on the band, despite the fact that there were a number of contests running simultaneously in the surrounding countries. Our station was the only one on the band from eastern Slovakia. It’s a shame there isn’t a higher participation in contests on the VHF and the 432 MHz band. We made only 8 connections in the race, 5 of which were arranged via the KST2me chat. We stirred a lot of interest but many of the connections I arranged through chat didn’t work out. We need to improve our equipment and I believe it will be much better next time.

Janko, OM3ZAH from Trebišov, joined us too and with his small portable station he went the Operational Activity Contest on the 144 MHz band.  Peter, OM8ADU, came around lunch and as he is a real ‘coffee lover’, we had a long debate about operation during VHF races and more. We just hope there’ll be more people from the east joining us on these bands :)

We run back home after a few hours due to a storm approaching from Heringeš. We weren’t too pleased as we expected far more stations. Our ODX is S59DGO from the locator JN75FO, which is 623 km. We did this Slovenian station (radio club) during the Ondrej Oravec Memorial, so we haven’t broken our club record yet.

Finally, the result: