Saturday, May 30, 2020

75FREE - the event and the team

5 years ago we organised the first commemoration of the end of WW2 by setting up a short award program and bringing several special calls in the air. There were 9 calls that time in the range of P*45FREE.

It was such a success that we decided to repeat the event this year - celebrating 75 years of freedom in PA. We found 10 operators - most of them present in 2015 - who were enthusiastic about activating a special call for a month.


Our plans included a group activity from a WW2 museum but COVID-19 blocked that option.We did have a smaller group activity with three operators from a nature reserve.


We have had a lot of fun using the special calls for a whole month, meeting a few familiar and a lot of new operators - a few of which became regulars. We enjoyed all contacts but the regulars brought a smile of recognition along the way. The most ear-catching was Veikko, OH2YV who seemed to appear on every band in both CW and phone. He is set to win the challenge we set by a wide margin - which is even more remarkable if you consider that he does not use digi modes (and therefore has less mode slots to score).


We are looking forward to a nice finale tomorrow. Today was a good example with a lot of Es during the morning and early afternoon creating special skips on virtually all bands.

Presenting the P*75FREE team:



PA75FREE (Wilco, PA1WBU)
PB75FREE (Geert, PA2GB)


PC75FREE (Tonnie, PA9CW)
PD75FREE (Marcel, PD7YY)



PE75FREE (Bas, PE4BAS)
PF75FREE (Bernard, PB7Z)




PG75FREE (Marcel, PE5TT)
PH75FREE (Lars, PH0NO)




PA75FREEDOM (Hans, PA3FYG)
PD75FREEDOM (Toon, PD0RWL)

Operators have been active on all bands that gave any possibility of making contacts from 160m up to 70cm (depending on license rights) both from home and /P in the field.

In 2015 we logged 11.000 contacts with almost 6.500 different operators in 117 DXCC. One day before ending the 2020 event we have made double the amount of QSOs with 11.5k different operators in 134 DXCC.

Conditions weren't better than back then but we did make more use of the now far more popular digital modes like FT8. Below you will find the share of each band in our database.



2 comments:

  1. Hello there, do you have a cluster where i can find you on band easy? Many thanks and good luck.73 Dominik

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    1. Hello Dominik (GWX?), if you use http://www.dxsummit.fi you can enter callsigns to watch out for (in the search box). On your phone the app Ham Alert is a nice one if you want to track specific spots. GL!
      73, Lars / PH75FREE

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