Last weekend I participated in the PACC (PA Country Contest) with the rest of my local club under the callsign PI4FL.
The PACC is a 24 hour radio contest where Dutch operators try to get as many contacts as possible, and where foreign operators try to collect as many Dutch contacts as possible – trying to gather all provinces in the meantime. The information exchanged is the province for a Dutch station and a sequential number for other stations, ie we would give 59 FL and the foreign station 59 001 to indicate their first contact.
The leader of our local club was able to claim his employers office for the weekend which kept us nice and warm, provided coffee, power and plenty of space to put up antennas. One of which is pictured above, it is a multiband beam (I think) with a dipole below, all set on a rotor. Other antennas were a dipole for 160m and 80m and a vertical random wire. All antennas were measured beforehand but we still had to go out in -3°C to reduce the legs of the 160m dipole by three meters on each side (and still it was a little long).
I spent the time from 23:00 until about 4:00 logging CW contacts. All in all good times were had by all, some visitors came by in the middle of the night just to say hello.
At 4:00 I went home to sleep and came back the next day to clear up after the contest was done. This year resulted in 975 QSOs, 175 more than last year.
Maybe I’ll practice with some other contests in the mean time :-).