Blog

After every contest there is that moment when the log is closed and you find yourself looking at a long list of callsigns, timestamps and reports. 815 lines of it after the CW field day 2026 with DL0AT/P. For us operators every one of those lines holds a small story – for everyone else it is a spreadsheet, at least at first. An animation of the contacts, on the other hand, makes it clear to anyone how a contest actually unfolds.

Many current club websites are/were built with Joomla or WordPress. Years go by and updates get put off: a template needs upgrading to the new major version, a plugin suddenly stops working, the PHP version runs out of support – and “just a quick update” turns into a whole afternoon of error messages, or the site eventually gets hacked. Sounds familiar? That exact pattern is what got me looking for a different approach for our club, E13.

This year the E13 crew once again entered the IARU Region 1 CW field day – operating, as before, from the meadow at the Ochsenwerder Norderdeich, right in the marshlands south of Hamburg. We were on the air as DL0AT/P (DOK E13) in the class Portable, Multi Operator, Low Power, unassisted.

A new year has begun and everything is slowly waking up from hibernation — which means it is time to announce the E13 field day 2024. Heiko (DH3IKO) has once again volunteered to organise it and act as the point of contact. Here is the official announcement.

As an alternative to WhatsApp the DARC has been trying to establish a matrix.org server for quite some time. Adoption is still a bit slow, though.

Here is a link to the E13 Hamburg-Alstertal room.

Sadly we had to cancel the CW field days in 2020 and 2021 because of Corona. This year things look very promising, so we expect to be operating from the field again.