Today we unloaded all the stored material and started to sort it out. It took us three hours to have most of the pieces in the right place. Then we began to unroll the coax and control cables for the highband shack and reconnected the StackMatches. Since we had left all yagi antennas installed from the SSB contest, we were able to recover the stations for 10, 15, and 20 meters quite fast...

 

In the next picture you can see DL2HBX on the 15m tower. He is cleaning the feeding point from the salt mud, which has come down during the last four weeks. The salt plus sand will build up a conducting surface, which may produce arcs when transmitting (St. Elmo's fire, hi...). The arcs can be heard on the other bands as strong noise. So we cleaned the antennas very properly.

 

Another easy task was to put up the 50 MHz station. It is just an IC-736 barefoot (100W) into a 5-ele Yagi, which can be rotated by hand. We were immediately able to work some ZS6 and other African stations. After 1700z also South America was coming in. It is amazing ("magic band"), why you can work e.g. a LU station with a 59 signal, and his friend sitting just 100 kilometers away cannot hear us at all... And this at a distance of more than 10,000 kilometers... Must really be a magic...

Left: Relaxing after a full working day (S51TA, DL5LYM, LY1DS, DL2MEH). Right: LY1DS enjoying one of the first pile-ups as 5C8M...