DO1DJJ's SOTA activation no. 500

Hello everybody!

Lately not so often a report about my activations.
But I think that my SOTA activation Nr. 500 is worth a few lines.
This week off and enjoyed the nice winter weather on Tuesday at Rockeskyller Kopf DM/RP-485.

Weather conditions: Sunny and 6 degrees below zero.
Parked the car in the village of Rockeskyll and a 30 minutes relaxed walk to the mountain peak.

Some pictures here, hope link will work now: DO1DJJ sotablog :-)

Thanks everybody who answered me on the last 500…

72 de Jörg

7 Likes

Well done Jorg on 500 activations.
Hope you enjoy the next 500 I hope you have made Mountain Goat by now.
Regards
Ian vk5cz …

Tnx Ian.
Iceblock here since 09/2010, meanwhile 2689 points.
S2S to vk would be a funny thing, but hard work with my limited license and via ssb, must improve cw, hi.

The approval of the DO license permits to broadcast in Germany on 160m/80m/15m and 10m and also 144-146 MHz, 430-440 MHz and 10GHz bands (DO…=CEPT novice class). This is different when e.g. active from Belgium, then you can hear me also on 40m/20m. Sometimes it works with fixed stations from down under, remembering Blackemichberg on October 2014 with Paul VK5PAS and a 2nd VK.

Hi Joerg - it’s possible - done it at least 3 times on just 5w SSB and a dipole on 20m - the key is the time of day and time of year. January & February are pretty well impossible but from April/May onwards if you can get out to a summit from about 7am local time (in your case, as you say, in Belgium or Holland, as the class E call doesn’t allow 20m in DL) it’s often possible if propagation is average or better.

It helps if the VK Summit operator is running either 30w+ or using phased verticals, but I’ve also managed (with headphones) 5wSSB to 5wSSB, Dipole to Dipole, S2S from EU to VK.

Long path propagation is the key. Short Path to VK tends to be in the middle of their night, where long path is early morning for us and early evening for the Aussies.

73 Ed DD5LP (DD5-Long_Path).

Several weeks ago I worked VK portable-to-portable r43/s55. Without noticing it I used a broken coax cable which resulted in about -18 dB on rx (don’t dare to think about tx output). With a decent cable it should work even better, just try it. :wink:

Ahoi,
Pom