From time I like to go mountain-topping for VHF contesting. Major European VHF contests are scheduled 1400z-1400z every first weekend of March, May, June (1296 MHz and up only), July, September (144 MHz only), October (432 MHz and up only), and November (CW only). Many portable operations take their equipment to a good VHF location for these weekends. My "personal mountain" is Mt. Wasserkuppe, 950m asl, located in JO40XL (international grid square). I have a contract with the German Army to use their parking place and electricity. The following pictures were taken on May 1, 1999:

 
Left: 144 MHz antennas; one single 11-ele Long Yagi ("Flexa Yagi") at approx. 15m height and an experimental system of four smaller horizontal yagis with power distribution (I never calculated the real pattern or efficiency of this thing, but it did, what it was supposed to do, hi...). I use super low-loss cable like hardline or H2000, because RG-213 has too much loss on VHF...
Right: my 144 MHz setup in a Volkswagen transporter (Kenwood TS-711A with modified frontstage, "SSB Electronics" solid state amplifier, Henry 2002 amp (750W out) plus some switching stuff. Not many portable teams care about it, but grounding every metallic piece of your setup helps you put out a crystal-clear signal and prevent splatter and QRM from others. I once had a local friend (10 km within viewing distance) starting to call CQ only 3 kHz away from my 20 kW ERP-signal, because he had found the frequency "clear"...

 
Left: A closer shot of "the thing". The idea behind it is simple: sitting in the middle of Europe means potential callers from all 360° around. If you throw away some HF in any direction, you can attract people from anywhere to call in. Then you only have to realize there is someone calling. If you cannot read his signal on the omnidirectional antenna, you may try to switch over to the Long Yagi (or stack) to pull out the signal. My first experiments with this strategy were back in 1984. Many other VHF contesters and teams use the same idea nowadays. There are even teams with four seperate four-stacks of long yagis and a kW on each system, hi... Right: A shot of the 432 MHz setup (1296 MHz still lying on the ground).
 
 

Software for VHF Contesting

The software "UKWTEST" was written by Peter, DL2NBU [available for DM 20,00 (~10 Dollars/10 Euros) from the Bavarian Contest Club (BCC)]. The URL is: http://www.uni-erlangen.de/~unrz45/BCC/projects/bccladen.htm. It looks and works very much like K1EA's CT (similar hotkeys and functions like check-partial, super-check-partial, CW output etc.). Below is a screenshot of my May 1994 operation from Wasserkuppe mountain (JO40XL, 950 m asl). I used two separate antenna systems, twice a 9-over-9 yagi at 10..12m. It looked quite similar to the scenery on the pix above. This screenshot shows a total of 1,031 QSOs on 144 MHz in just 24 hours (...only broke the 1,000 Q barrier once, hi). The first hour normally produces 100-120 QSOs, the next hours 60-80, while after midnight you can only work some 10-20 QSOs per hour - but with loooong distances, when the band is quiet (mostly CW)...

The scoring system in Germany (and some other European countries) is quite interesting: Since both stations exchange the full 6-digit grid locator (like JO40XL, or JN64AF in the screenshot above), there is an easy algorithm, which can calculate the distance between the two stations down to an avarage accuracy of three kilometers. In the example you can see that JN64AF is 712 km apart from JO40XL. Well, this contact now gives you 712 points! A station only 20 kilometers away will give you only 20 points. So you need to have an excellent location, which is not too close (!) to the main activity centres like Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, the Netherlands or Western Czech Republic. You must be able to reach a big number of stations, but they must be some kilometers away to give you decent points...  In this contest I worked 1,031 stations with an average distance of 276 kilometers for a total score of 284,264 points. The longest distance was 854 kilometers.

UKWTEST gives you some statistics, too. This example shows, which directions the points (not necessarily the stations) are coming from. As you can see, it is an advantage to be in the middle of Germany. There is activity all around you:

In this contest I worked 90 different grid squares, but only 16 different DXCC countries on 144 MHz (normally 20+). They came from:
 

country	QSOs	country	QSOs	country	QSOs	country	QSOs
DL	744	OE	22	ON	16	G	7
OK	56	F	21	SP	12	OM	6
PA	55	S5	21	OZ	11	HA	4
HB9	30	I	16	9A	9	SM	1

I do also have equipment for 432 MHz and 1296 MHz operation. I do not use that too often, because the QSO rates are lower on these bands. Whenever we go to the mountain with two or three others, I normally chose 144 MHz as my favourite band... [BTW: Contesting on 50 MHz is NOT allowed in Germany !] My best scores on 432 and 1296 MHz are (same location, JO40XL):
 

Band (MHz)	month	QSOs	score (km)	average distance (km)	longest distance (km)
144	May '94	1,030	284,264	276	854*
432	Oct. '94	513	137,437	268	876*
1296	Oct. '95	330	111,119	337	1,011*

* in this particular contest

DL6FBL, 28/02/00
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