24 hours at OE1W

06 September 2025 ·2 m

A guest at the Traisnerhütte for the IARU Region 1 VHF contest. 1,038 QSOs in twenty-four hours, rank six out of 193 multi-op stations across all of Europe.

Morning panorama from the Muckenkogel, a closed sea of fog filling the valleys — Sep 6, 2025 · JN77TX

In September 2025 I got to visit the contest station OE1W. It sits at the Traisnerhütte on the Muckenkogel above Lilienfeld, at 1,313 metres, locator JN77TX. Radio amateurs have been guests there for more than twenty years.

The climb up was good, the weather perfect.

The Traisnerhütte on the Muckenkogel, the contest station's masts all around

The contest

The IARU Region 1 VHF contest on 144 MHz ran from Saturday 16:00 to Sunday 16:00 — twenty-four hours without a break. In the end the log book counted 1,910 logs from 35 countries.

OE1W’s result:

1,038 contacts were logged, 976 of them counted after cross-checking — an error rate of 6.4 percent, a very clean figure for a night of continuous operating. That worked out to 409,912 points and with it rank 6 of 193 multi-op stations across all of Region 1.

The longest contact went to G4PIQ in England — 1,127 kilometres on two metres.

The antennas

This is the part that hits you first on arrival. Five antenna groups stand up there:

8 × 9 elements      4 × 9 elements      2 × 18 elements
4 × 4 × 8 elements                      3 × 12 elements

Together that’s more than thirty Yagis and, counting up the elements, a good three hundred of them. Plus one kilowatt at the final amplifier.

Stacked Yagis one above another on the mast, veil clouds behind

That makes OE1W one of the most modern VHF contest stations in Europe. It’s not any single piece of gear that shows it, but the fact that everything fits together: antennas, preamps, feed lines, rotators, computers.

The operating positions inside, the cable runs along the wooden wall above

Twenty-four hours

A contest spanning a full day has its own rhythm. Saturday evening is loud, at night things thin out and the contacts reach further, and by Sunday morning everything comes back once more. When the sun sits low, you finally see how much is hanging in the air up there.

The big mast with the stacked groups in flat light, the flag and the hut's roofs beside it

On Sunday morning a closed sea of fog lay in every valley, and the masts stood free above it.

Two antenna masts above a closed sea of fog, the Alps behind

Thanks

Many thanks to Michael Kastelic, OE1MCU, president of the Austrian experimental transmitter association, to Rainer, OE3REC, and to Emir, E77DX — for the invitation, for the time, and for letting me watch a station work that plays in that league.

73 · OE5SOS