Concurso El Rey de España
Today I was again in a HAM Radio contest; the Concurso S.M. El Rey de España SSB (the King of Spain contest). I haven’t done many contests this year so I decided that it was time again for this!
It gave me an opportunity to test all my antennas again and see if everything still works ok. Especially the antennas can, depending on the weather and all kinds of other reasons, not work as I would expect.
I found out that my 15m band antenna wasn’t as good as it normally is but I blame it on the temperature in the room. A warmer room makes the copper wire antenna longer which makes the antenna work on a lower frequency. In the end it worked ok, just needed a little bit of tuning from my small MFJ tuner.
in the end I made about 78 contacts with other Radio Amateurs which was ok, because propagation wasn’t that great this weekend!
The big news in this contest was actually that I talked to the (ex) King of Spain! I checked his call sign on the widely used website QRZ.COM and found out that it really was the king I talked to. Actually twice, on the 20m and 10m band! His call sign is EA0CJ and his info an be found here. I sent him also a QSL card which I hope he will reciprocate!
Although I’m not 100% certain this really was the king I’m pretty confident that it really was him. If not the contacts still gave me 2 multipliers so that was also ok! 🙂