IARU HF Championship July 2016

For this years IARU HF Championship contest on July 9th-10th, 2016, members of the newly formed EI DX Group put on big effort from a green field site with a multi multi station (Multi Radio/ Multi Op) for this contest. The objective for this contest is to contact as many other radio amateurs, especially IARU member society HQ stations, around the world as possible using the 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meter bands. 

We had a 7 station setup for the weekend and were QRV from 10m through 160m bands both on SSB & CW.  The callsign used for the weekend was EI0HQ as the National Irish Headquarter station.

Here was some of the photographs from the weekend thanks to Thos EI2JD.

The EI DX Group operators for the contest

EI0HQ - Multi Multi Station 

 Pete EI4GZB and Declan EI9HQ on SSB 40m

Dave EI4BZ and Myself EI5IX having the craic

 Oleg EI7KD flat out on CW

 Enda EI2II enjoying 10m SSB

Jim EI8GS on 15m SSB

Mark EI6JK in a Pile up on 20m SSB

Thos EI2JD working mults on 40m SSB

Myself EI5IX trying to get serious on 15m CW

Again Myself EI5IX "trying to find a needle in a hay stack" on 20m SSB

One of the HEX Beams in the clear 

Our 80m Vertical

 Pat EI9HX working on the Electrics 

Tri-Bander No. 1 

 The lads working on Tri-Bander No.2

Tri-Bander No.2 up and running with a 40m rotatable Dipole

I really enjoyed the weekend it was a fantastic opportunity to test out some antennas also new equipment and it was a great way to meet new people within our DX group. The weather conditions throughout the weekend could have been better and was quiet variable at times, as on the Friday when setting up the station we had beautiful clear sky's and sunshine but then it rained on the Saturday and Sunday and of course then cleared up for taking everything down at the end of the contest... Typical.... Propagation for this contest was not great this year and activity seemed low at times with the effects of the solar minimum certainly being observed across the bands throughout the weekend and a minor geomagnetic storm was observed during the previous 24 hours of the contest and with a high speed solar wind stream which remained geo-effective, there was some isolated periods of storming which remained throughout the contest unfortunately. Not to worry we all enjoyed the weekend and learned a lot about our EI DX Group including each other. I'm certainly looking forward to meeting up with the guys again and doing some other contests and DXpedition's in the future. The results are still yet to come for this contest hopefully we did alright and my thanks goes to all the EI operators that turned up and made this weekend possible, I really enjoyed myself and I hope you got the opportunity to work us either on SSB or CW and on as many of the bands as you could over the weekend.

If not I hope to catch you in the next contest.

73,