Dear all:
Today, I planned a quick evening activation of DM/BW-484 (Bussen), a nice 8-pointer I can very much recommend for the scenic operating position near an old castle and view over much of Upper Swabia.
Of course, the 500m ascent - distance, not gain in altitude is not a real challenge. But Covid times require flexibility ;-).
Now, the first thing I noticed was heavy traffic on 40m; I had not checked for contests. After trying 7.031 down to 7.002, I thought 7002.6 was clear, called CQ (after two rounds of ? and QRL?), and was spotted by RBN quite quickly:
However, no callers arrived, and RBNhole did not create a spot from the RBN input. After a while, strong contest stations took over my frequency.
So I gave up and resorted to 30m in the hope of a relaxed evenly activation, called CQ at 1555Z and was again spotted quickly by RBN:
@UR4EZ answered my call at 1602Z but did not seem to understand my request to spot me, so he was likely not interested in SOTA.
But still no SOTA spot from RBNhole / RBNgate.
After 10 minutes of trying 30m, I QSYd to 14060.2 at 16:06Z, and again, RBN picked up my 5 W signal quickly - with a surprising 48 dB from @W1NT-6:
Only after that third spotting from RBN did RBNhole / RBNgate create a spot for me:
and quickly @DJ5AV, @AK8A, @AB4PP and @EA7GV came to my rescue.
What was planned as a walk in the part was a much harder fight to secure the eight points.
Now, my main question is - what went wrong? Why didnāt RBhole/RBNgate spot me?
As far as I can see, my alert was correct:
My guess is that RBNhole/RBNgate was overloaded by the content-based flood of spot data. But why did it work on 20m but neither on 30m nor 40m?
Thanks for any insights!
73 de Martin, DK3IT