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All seven antennas are mounted on small trolleys, which can be lowered if one of the antennas need maintenance. The upper antennas can be rotated 450 degrees, the lower ones only about 70 degrees (between JA and USA). All rotors are Yaesu GX2880DXC's.

This setup was fine for the first year or so, but then I realized I needed something better for 80, than a Delta loop. I decided to erect a 150 foot self-supporting steel tower, and a 3 element Opti-Beam antenna has been installed for 80 meters. The monster required a bigger rotator, so an Italian-made GE1500/T was installed.

This is most probably the biggest amateur radio antenna in Hungary, and there are not many bigger ones in Europe either... The only "single element" band remains 160 meters, where the tuned tower vertical is not a winner, so sooner or later a better TX antenna will be built.

When I decided to try Multi-Two, I bought FTDX5000 transceivers, and OMPower amplifiers for the two main operating positions, and the secondary radios are an FT2000 and an FT1000MP.

Each pair of radios have Acom lockout devices. The antennas are controlled by a SixPack and StackMatches from WX0B.

We take part in almost every contest, which means I drive on most Fridays from Érd (near Budapest) to Debrecen, about 150 miles one way. Then Friday afternoon we have to fix Beverages, check software and all equipment, and have contesting fun over the weekend

So far we have never had serious technical issues, except that because of the location (a remote "farm" in the middle of a large forest), in stormy weather we lost electricity once or twice.

Operators include people from my former HG7T core team (HA5AGS, HA5WA, HA5MY, HG5DX), but I also found good people in Eastern Hungary (HA8IB, HA9PP, HA0DU). Occasionally other contesters join us, like HA5PP, HA0NAR, HA8JV, UZ5DX).

The very continental location (grid locator KN07vn) is not the greatest one for winning. The rule of thumb in European contesting is "the one who works the most Americans, is the winner". There is normally no big difference between the number of multipliers worked by us and the stations in Western Europe.

We even have an advantage of working Asia easier. But this does not compare with the fact that some of our competition are 25% closer to the US, and to the Caribbean, which provides a little advantage for them to catch more multipliers on low bands. This is a given, and it is especially true, when 10 and 15 meters are wide open. We will see when these bands are much worse (that is, no big runs of US on 10), then our larger antennas, and capability of TXing in at least two directions should bring us closer to the top.

The installation of the second 40 m Yagi, and the incorporation of a tribander towards Africa to the system, should also help.

73 and CU in the next Contest!     Tibi HA7TM/HG7T close

Monteverde is 2100 ft high positioned without any city building and this gave us the possibility of exploiting a very quiet place with very low “take-off” angles in any direction.

Like all good things, even here there is a flip side, not very pleasant, due to a very high daily wind speed (around 35Mph) and high humidity that very often changes to a terrible fog. All this makes a very stressful environment for both humans and hardware.

The shack is 1200 square feet inside a property of about 86,000 square feet. The house has 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and a large open space where all 6 band positions can take space together with the kitchen.

Outside, 8 towers from 45 to 120 feet high are covering the entire area, that also includes a small garage that houses a 60KvA power generator.

Because everything was erected from scratch, starting with D4B activity (the previous owner), we had the possibility to design a specific hardware according to the location.

The first thing we wished to eliminate was the rotators. It is easy to imagine how long they can resist in such an environment.

So we have all fixed antennas, 4 in each band from 10 to 20 (yagis) and 2 for 40 and 80m (2 el. delta loops). For top band we use a quarter wave vertical with 60 radials and we use a HI-Z 4 square + beverages for receive on the low bands.

To control all the hardware we don’t use any commercial devices. All the automatic switching system have been designed and built by ourselves. This includes a 6X4 antenna switch (antennas for 6 bands shared automatically between 4 positions), band-decoders and antenna switches.

Underground we put about 1500 feet of ½” coaxial cable and about 300 feet of 7/8” coax plus several thousand feet of electrical cables for services.

About 5 tons of materials have been shipped from Europe from 2007 till now to allow us to turn into reality what was first designed on paper.

D4C has been active in all modes from 160 to 2m, collecting more than 250,000 qso’s.

On 6 meters we have a beacon running on 50.034 and very often it is spotted as the only signal on the band.

Due to our position this often happens also on 10m during contests.

We are generally active in the Multi op categories, from M/S to M/2 but we started in CQWW CW 2012 to join M/M category and this has been replayed on 2013 both SSB and CW. If you like to take a look at our scores please visit www.d4c.cc

Without the help of some people such a project would never have been possible. We must thank our technical partners:

Momobeam antennas (www.momobeam.com) for providing the antennas on our project.

Messi & Paoloni coax (www.messi.it) for supplying us with a double jacket coax cable to resist to hard humidity.

Coolqsl (www.coolqsl.com) to print our qsl cards.

Thanks to the more than 30 guest operators that allow the team to reach top scores.

Thanks to all of you that constantly call us during the contests.

We confirm qso's via LoTW, E-QSL and directly and bureau via manager IZ4DPV.

Our contacts:
Website:    www.d4c.cc
Shop:    http://shop.d4c.cc (support us!)
E-mail:    info@d4c.cc
Facebook:    www.facebook.com/D4C.STATION
Twitter: D4C_team

Since then we have been constantly evolving the station and operator team. Today we have 12 operators involved with the station operation and maintenance:

PY1NB – Felipe (Host), PY1ZV – Fábio, PY1NX – Soni, PY1FI – Anderson, PY4TJ – Carlos, PY1ON – Lineu, PY1GQ – Chicão, PY1MK – Marcos, PU1MKZ – Fernando, PY1CPF – André, PY1EW – Fábio, PY1TR – Felipe

We have four operating positions, we usually have a pair of K3 rigs, TS590 and FT200 plus two legal power (PY legal power) amplifiers.

We have developed and home brewed our own microprocessor based interlocking system, monoband stackmatches using LC circuits and a wireless remote control based on Zigbee technology that controls rotators, stackmatches and any other relay we possibly need to control.

We have replaced most of the gadgetry and clutter of having many control boxes around by Android tablets with the controls on screen!

In the last five years we have been top five on Worked All Europe DX Contests, as PR1T or using some of the operators callsign and we are usually active in the major contests: ARRL DX, CQWW and CQWPX.

Our objectives for 2014 are to keep the PR1T call on the air in all possible contests, keep developing our home made solutions, improve low bands RX and replace our 20m antenna setup.

73 de PR1T team! CU IN TEST! close