For someone who hasn't competed in the European HF Championship (EUHFC) yet, it's difficult to plan a strategy. Since it’s only a 12-hour contest, propagation conditions won’t necessarily repeat the next day, and anyone who misses the opportunity to make the necessary contacts will fail. So the plan was simple—make as many contacts as possible on 15m and 10m, with the expectation that the lower bands would open up later.
Contest Saturday didn’t exactly get off to an ideal start—I had to attend to work obligations, a visitor dropped by, and the weather radar was showing numerous storms in the area. My friends know I can’t stand that kind of distraction during a contest, heh.
I start on 10m, where Italian stations are passing through. After a few minutes, however, the phone rings and QRL calls…. After almost an hour and a half, I’m back, but the propagation conditions aren’t what they were. So I’m forced to switch to 15m, but since there aren’t any stations there either, I alternate between that and 20m. That’s noticeably better. The hardest part is finding a frequency to call. Since the stations are relatively close—that is, in the quiet band—they can’t hear each other. And as if that weren’t enough, the phone rings again in the early evening.
As evening falls, it’s time for 40m. Stations from the European part of Russia are coming in with excellent signal strength, and of course everyone else too. I can’t help but be amazed at who all is calling. I switch back and forth with the 80-meter band, where it’s still quiet, and once I start calling, a string of eager stations comes on the air. Reception is often difficult, not because of interference between stations, but because of QRN from thunderstorms. On my second computer, I open http://www.blitzortung.org/Webpages/index.php?lang=en&page=1 and track the progress of the storms. After the first “wave” of stations subsides, I return to 40m—there are more stations and less crackling. Before long, 40m overtakes 20m in both multipliers and points. I’m not used to this; this band requires great mental resilience and operator skill to deal with its specific challenges.
No one wants to go on 160m—it’s incredibly noisy there—and it looks like everyone will switch to the top band only at the very end. This doesn’t look good; the main storm front is still approaching, and by the end of the EUHFC, it’ll only get worse. Apparently, others are realizing too that the band will be unusable by the end. Connections are made relatively easily; the code used in the EUHFC is simple, and if you’ve worked the station in question on other bands, all you need to do is correctly understand the call sign, hi.
As the contest draws to a close, the pace is slowing down, and I’m frequently switching bands. I wanted to break the 100k-point barrier, but it just eluded me. It’s a shame about the time spent on work obligations—maybe just five more contacts on the upper bands would have been enough to make it.
| Band | Contacts | Points | Multipliers |
| 1.8 MHz | 54 | 54 | 31 |
| 3.5 MHz | 123 | 123 | 49 |
| 7.0 MHz | 224 | 224 | 54 |
| 14 MHz | 90 | 90 | 46 |
| 21 MHz | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| 28 MHz | 9 | 9 | 8 |
| TOTAL | 506 | 506 | 194 |
| RESULT | 98,164 |