Alex, IK8YFU and Fabrizio, SWL I0-111RM convinced me to join the ARI DX Contest. Thanks to Michele, IZ4GWE I had the opportunity to play for 3 hours on the air in this contest as IQ4RA. To be honest, the propagation was quite good and the station was absolutely not an average one: with a tower,a yagi and whatever you need to have fun in a mid-class contest. But, despite these impressive working conditions, there was not a massive participation in my logbook. Probably all the attention of the dxers was concentrated on 7O6T. For example, twenty and fifteen meters didn’t perform well at all. It was quite boring, and just after 2 spots a bunch of UK’s call-sings were able to push the runner to an acceptable rate (thank you guys!). I don’t know how many stations participated to the ARI International DX Contest from Ravenna, but I think RA was an interesting multiplier, anyway a lot of calls were sent from us without any answer bak. Moreover, many OMs doesn’t know this contest, they were often asking what I was expecting as exchange (3 on 5 QSOs). I’m sure, probably the contest itself has a potential, but it needs 2-3 years more of promoting activities.
Anyway, every cloud has a silver lining and we jumped quickly to compete on the pile-up of 7O6T. Before year 2000, I made few QSOs with Yemen, but the activity was not considered valid from ARRL. So, concerning 7O6T, the war chest of today is not bad at all! I’m waiting for the next update of the log online to check if my QSOs are in. Signals were excellent (the path is just perfect for us) only on 10 meters CW the QSO was quite difficult; I had to insiste a lot before passing the wall of stations calling, for other bands were much easier.
Let’s wait for tomorrow and “crossfinger” to have a look on ClubLog.

TNX Michele for the hospitality.