2015 ARRL EME Contest

This weekend I had fun working the second leg of the 2015 ARRL EME contest.  There were two legs for VHF operators, one at the beginning of November and one at the end of the month.  Each leg was 48 hours, with local moonrise around 10pm or so -- making for very late nights!

My small EME station worked nicely.  37 unique stations worked over 21 different country / state combinations:  Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, USA -  North Dakota, USA - Arkansas, USA - California, USA - Illinois, USA - New Jersey, USA - Texas.  

The equipment was the same as usual:  Antennas are a pair of M2 2M7 yagis, transmitter is a W6PQL KW LDMOS amp, and the receivers are a Yaesu FT-817ND running WSJT9 software and a FunCube Pro+ Dongle running MAP65 software.  The low-noise ARR SP144VDG preamp is on the mast at the antenna.   Split RX / TX lines protect the dual receivers and preamp from the transmit power.  

Having MAP65 allowed me to see the entire EME sub-band at once, so I was able to keep an eye on the other stations in the contest and watch for CQ calls.   This year, the contest rules changed to allow internet chats, but with MAP65 there's not a whole lot of need to look at other spotting sites or chats to find other stations.  

One of the best contacts was with the W6YX Stanford Club station.  Since they're easily close enough (about 100mi away) to hear terrestrial signals directly, and these signals obscure the much weaker moon-reflected signals.   Only when the moon is setting does the Doppler shift (caused by the relative motion of stations on earth moving rapidly away from the moon) reduce the frequency of the reflected signals enough to make a QSO possible.  This time, we used mode JT65A (narrower bandwidth) to more easily separate the direct vs. moon signals.  It worked great -- I was able to copy them on the second call.

Here's a list of the stations worked:  HB9Q LA8KV RZ3BA/1 OH6ZZ SM4GGC EA4CYQ I2FAK KB8RQ 7K3LGC W5ZN NT0V W6YX DL25UN DF9UX RU1AA LZ1DP YL2GD DL8SCQ DK5EW DG0KW OH2BC I3MEK EA6VQ OH2BYJ GM6VXB SM5KWU DD0VF K5LA UA3PTW HA8CE F6HVK PA0JMV F6APE PA2CHR K1JT OH4LA RK3FG

All in all, another fun contest!

Dave