OK2KKW UHF Contest Dx-pedition to France in 1994

Our friend Petr (ex OK2VIA), the original founder of OK2KKW from Brno has relatives in France. He could arrange help and accomodation for us (a big TNX!) at a French ham radio club in the mountains near Strasbourg in east France. Our contest QTH was almost at the top of Champ de Feu hill (JN38OJ) about 60 km south-west from Strasbourg. There’s a famous ski-center with many ski lifts at about 1100 m a.s.l. there. There are higher hills to the south-west, more then 1400 m a.s.l., but as we were told, nature park authorities don’t allow ham radio contesters there. Fortunately it was the direction to the Alps (which are relatively near) so it didn’t bother us so much. There’s an old tourist outlook-tower on top of Champ de Feu, too, but unfortunately due to greens we weren’t allowed to use it for the contest, either. Our contest place was at the north side of the hill, about 30 meters below the top with the opening from the south-east to the south-west. Because of trees and the top of the hill to the south we lost about 100 degrees of the horizon. This might have been one of the reasons why we couldn’t make a better result in the European scope.

Our French friends did a wonderful job and arranged an older caravan with 2 kW Honda power generator for us. The contest itself was a real success. There was a good propagation to the east and the callsign F/OK2KKW/p was exciting for many hams as well.

A big surprise for us was the way of contesting of French hams. They don’t run the contest over the night! They told us ham radio was fun and pleasure for them, but they didn’t like to be tired after the contest...I think, that this attitute of many French ops might prevent them from better results. Those mountains are otherwise really brilliant for VHF/UHF contesting. Distances to PA and G are at the average 400 - 500 km and the distance to Germany with the very high VHF/UHF activity is 100 to 200 km. This reduces the QRM from the strong local stations as we know it in our home QTH in the western part of Czech Republic. Due to a good propagation to the east we were able to make many QSOs to OK, too. Some stations were surprisingly strong. For a better imagination you could open our contest log here. Our best DX was to GM. We made a much better result then our local competitor F6HPP (a very good and well-known French station). For many stations we were the first F station (!) on 70 cm! It is still a mystery for us, why this large area is not better used by other F stations. There were no active stations on 70 cm at least 20 km around us!

Concerning results we won this contest in France and in Czech Republic and took 5^th place in the 70 cm multi op category in Europe.

You can see a photo gallery from this event here.

CUAGN on 70 cm

OK1VPZ

August 2000