This is probably a very common question among many amateurs radio, expecially the ones who joined the hobby reacently and are willing to get into a 48 hours contest, but what they see every month in a radio magazine is monster antennas up on a 200 foot tower.
All this may look a little discouraging to their eys, the feelling is that in order to compete to those big guns is a must to put up a station like that, well this is not necessarily true, infact the important thing to star up with is to look for a niche on wich concentrate all of your effort, you are not going to put up a multi multi station straight away, probably you will never end up with something like that.
The answer to the question ....
This is probably a very common question among many amateurs radio, expecially the ones who joined the hobby reacently and are willing to get into a 48 hours contest, but what they see every month in a radio magazine is monster antennas up on a 200 foot tower.
All this may look a little discouraging to their eys, the feelling is that in order to compete to those big guns is a must to put up a station like that, well this is not necessarily true, infact the important thing to star up with is to look for a niche on wich concentrate all of your effort, you are not going to put up a multi multi station straight away, probably you will never end up with something like that.
The answer to the question can be yes if you are very keen in what you doing, knowing that it may will take some time before you reach the ideal compromise (do not forget we are only dealing with a tribander).
What you will read herebelow is a short description of how I started and the steps I tooke to being able to say yes a tribander can make it!!!
My approch to the contest era started in 1972, I was only 15 years old at that time, actually I should say we were only 15, infat Claudio I4VEQ and I does days still without licence were using his uncle station (I4BNR) to run contests like the scandinavian, all asian, arrl, with pretty good results as well.
Once I got my own licence, I was only able to put up a rotary dipole at my parents house and with an FT 250 alone as you can imagine contest was only replaying to does day famous calls sign, but meanwhile a contest station was slowly putting togeter up on a hill over looking Bologna, This station the last few years has been known as IQ4A and you probably have seen this call sign frequently on score lists.
But the idea of doing someting on may own was still alive, therfore as a first step I looked for a place that could give me the same advantages being experienced in years of contest from the team location, I had finally ended up on a hill 5 Km south of IQ4A's location, about 430 m a.s.l.
The take off toward norht America was just perfect, 50 meters away from the tower the ground slopes down a couple of hundreds meters, which turns out to give me a bunch of very low narrow lobes, the same thing applies toward Japan on which the ground slopes down only at 20 meters away.
These conditions make a perfect shot to the two big sacks of QSOs, it lengthen the band openig at least 1hour more in comparison to the stations down the vally, the antenna height from the nearest ground at this point as very little importance, by the way due to some toll trees I had to put the TH5 on a tower at 24m.
At this height all three bands worked well, but 15 meters has been proven to be the most competitive one, so I choose it and I started to enter as SO15 the ARRL, WPX, ALL ASIAN with excellent results, but the CQWWDX is a different story, competition is really tough, you have to compete against a huge number of stations who are preparing them self well in advance up grading their stations just for the event.
Then I looked where I could improve the station and I found the 70 meters rg 213 loss to be almost 50%, then it was replaced with a 1/2 inch hardline and the loss dropped down to 10%,but at its end there was still the TH5, the Italian 300w AMP was changed to get closer to the antenna rate, the final touch came from the centennial of the invention of the radio, living under the town hall of Sasso Marconi I was granted the special prefix IY1 which certainly gave me an extra help.
According to the high claimed scores of CQWWDX95 I turned out to be 6th world and 1st europe, if it will be confirmed I will be totally paid back of the effort I put on this contest, and also every motiveted tribander owner may can start to think that a continental leader ship is not that far away.
See you soon in the contest I4LEC
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