I received today two new QSLs for Europe 15m and W/VE 80m. Thanks!
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DE4BAH: Road to DEM
1980 I joined the Bundeswehr (Germany Army) in the Heinrich-Hertz-Barracks, in Daun, for basic training. On the military area we had the clubstation DF0DA. In the spare time or during boring instruction it was fun to work from this well equipped clubstation. Six month later I came to my place of action at Air Base Diepholz. My working place was a radio direction finding station of the „Peilzentrale Heer“ in the Diepholz Moor (see link to the Air Base, picture in the middle: “Kampfführungsanlage Bambus”).
At the „Fliegerhorst“ were no more HAMs and it was not allowed to transmit inside the military area. I decided to learn more about the HAM bands and the propagation on the bands as SWL. From the DARC I’ve got the SWL sign „DE4BAH“. I had so much time for SWLing, that I won the UBA SWL Competition in the CW-class (a 1 year SWL contest).
I also decided to try to reach the SWL Champion status „Deutscher Empfangsmeister (DEM)„. „Empfangsmeister“ have a „DE-Zero“ SWL sign. Today’s rules are a little bit easier. It is necessary to own the DLD-H-100 Diploma, but in the early 80′ every station must be heard 3x on different dates. The SWL needed a large logbook and many crosscheck-tables. Nobody had of course a PC with e.g. Excel or a DB-software at home.
When I left the army, conditions were down and I had no more time to observe the bands so intensive. Especially on 10m I missed a lot of countries. From the tons of QSLs I sent out I only got back a small content. That’s SWL’s live and so I forgot my goal DEM.
Last year I detected on DX-Cluster a lot of OCEANIA stations on 10m and I remembered to DEM. GLOBAL QSL printed SWL DE4BAH cards ( I wonder why many QSL print shops are not able to offer CORRECT standard SWL QSLs) for me. DARC re-issued DE4BAH to me (because I gave up the radio-hobby and DARC from 1998 to 2008). The CQ WW CW DX-Contest 2012 should bring me now a lot of missed stations into my SWL log. And – STRIKE – this was a good plan! Except South America on 20m I received and logged all, what I need.
All QSLs are now sent directly. But this is another story …
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