Today I’ve hiked to Cerro de San Pedro, SOTA summit EA4/MD-020 (1425m), to work in the last national V-UHF contest of the year: concurso QSL. This contest is a bit particular, because it coincides with the IARU-R1 UHF & up contest, so the contacts in the UHF & up bands count for both contests. As always, I’m participating in the 6 hours category with my QRP station: a FT-817ND with 5W and a 3 element yagi on 144MHz and 7 element yagi on 432MHz (the Arrow satellite yagi).
I arrived at the summit at 8:00UTC and worked until the end of the contest, at 14:00UTC, so I could enjoy almost 6 full hours of operation. As expected, after 12:00UTC there where few people left in the contest, as almost everybody had gone for lunch. The map of stations worked is below. Stations in green where worked both on 144MHz and 432, stations in blue where worked only on 144MHz and my operating position is marked in red.
Participation has been perhaps a bit low and propagation was not so good at times, but overall I’m happy with my results, which compare well with other contests this year. I missed some usual stations from the zones EA3 and EA5. I think that propagation to these zones was only open briefly during the contest.