After a long day of work and 1000km in a new car, I finally arrived at our contest location in Büren. Seven other operators were already at the site and gave me a warm welcome.
First I needed to get rid off my suit and set up my tent in a short period without rain. After the delivered pizza food I gave out the QSL-cards. The situation looked like Christmas or a family gathering: everbody looked through his cards and showed the best to the others 🙂 I felt like at home and at a place where I belong to.
The shack is not that large, but cozy and well equipped for the contest.
I just fetched around 200 QSL-cards from our DOK QSL-card-manager Mareike DO4HSI. These are cards for our D23-crew members at the IARU-contest-location in Büren this weekend.
Contests, Fielddays and other meetings are a good chance for handing out QSL-cards to the D23-members which has been sent to our QSL-card-manager by the DARC QSL-bureau. As I live nearby to DO4HSI it is no problem to fetch the – every time carefully sorted and packed (thanks for the service! 🙂 ) – cards and take them with me to the events I visit. With the help of our preparation-pages in our Wiki (like this for the contest) we know who will attend an event or we ask at our mailing-list who wants to have her/his card proxy-routed by somebody else. This works for a couple of years already and the number of cards increase with the number of members and our activities.
This time I also received two cards! One from Klaus DM2DTH with whom I had a PSK31 conversation on 80m in August 2008 and the other one is from my conversation with DO3BOX last Saturday 🙂
From July 11 to 12 there will be the IARU HF World Championship 2009 Contest. I will join the Chaoswelle-Crew at our contest-location DF0AT in Büren, Westphalia, JO41GN.
Unfortunately I never took part in a contest and I guess I have to learn what to say and how the points are given. But this time I want to try an hour or two at the microphone. As we are not that many operators this time, any help should back up the team.
We will have a full weekend of camping, cooking and I’m looking forward meeting my Chaoswelle-mates again. When you are distributed all over Europe and don’t have a weekly meeting in a kind of club room, events and private visits are the only possibilty to see each other.