The JRC Radio Club couldn’t help but participate in an amateur radio contest entitled European Union DX!
The EUDX Contest is a worldwide competition organized to promote radio contacts among radio amateurs in the EU and beyond. This year’s competition took place on February 4-5 and was facilitated by excellent ionospheric propagation on the high-frequency bands, which also allowed many contacts on the high bands (i.e., 21 and 28 MHz).
Michele IZ1POA and Francesco IK2VXT of the JRC Radio Club joined friends from radio station IQ1RF in Chieri to participate in the contest. IQ1RF is a well-equipped station housed at the Civil Defense facility in Chieri (near Turin). The station, operated by Sergio IW1FSQ, has multiple directional antenna systems mounted on steeltowers, while other wire antennas were mounted ad hoc. The Contest rules awarded more points for EU contacts than for an intercontinental contact, so we decided to install low-elevation wired antennas that radiate the signal at a greater angle than top-mounted antennas, with the goal of better coverage of close-range communications.
The competition lasted 24 hours, from 1 p.m. local time on Saturday to 12:59 p.m. on Sunday. We could operate 3 radios at the same time, but since we were competing for the single-transmitter multioperator category, we could only radiate a single signal at a time, so we interlocked the radios to avoid multiple simultaneous transmissions. We started and ended our contest on the high bands, which have better propagation in daylight. During the night we focused on the low bands, 40-80-160m, making sure to contact as many European regions (NUTS2) as possible because each new NUTS2 would work as a multiplier of our score. During the contest contact, we exchanged with the other ham radio operator a signal strength report (usually 59, where readability 5 means perfectly readable, and signal strength 9 means an extremely strong signal), and the NUTS3 code, in our case we would transmit IT14 for Piedmont. During the competition we alternated voice contacts in SSB (sideband) emission and Morse code. We managed to make as many as 933 contacts in all regions of the world, from the Americas to Oceania, scoring a over 9 million points and ranking fourth in the world!
Our setup worked very well…proving once again that it is essential to run well-equipped stations in terms of antenna systems (hear, hear!).
