Dear community of Slovak radio amateurs.
I want to inform you about the disaster that befell our international Spring Sprint race with small performance /SS Test/ which has been running for years on Easter Monday from 14.00 to 20.00 GMT.
On the last Easter Monday, the Germans suddenly rushed into our race. In this case, it is the German radio amateur organization DARC /Deutscher Radio Amateur Club/. Easter Monday was also liked last year by another German club, the Deutsche Telegrafie Club. However, this club has thoughtfully timed their race from 06.00 to 09.00 GMT and thus did not damage our race.
However, DARC chose the time from 15:00 to 17:30 for its new home race, on two bands of 3.5 and 7 MHz, which completely killed our race, as at that time the participants of our race were retuning to lower bands because the propagation conditions on higher bands had deteriorated. However, they ran into a wall of very strong signals from German stations. This race was not announced in any of the usual world racing calendars and no one knew what the conditions of the race were. So when the storm from DARC did not stop, the participants of our race had nowhere to go and continue the race. The small edges of the bands that remained were not sufficient for European and long-distance connections due to bands of ionospheric noise that happened to settle there. And after 18.00 GMT, the 3.5 and 7 MHz bands were also closed.
I consider this DARC action an ugly insult to all participants of our race. It really takes a special kind of people to destroy an old and beautiful race so cruelly, recklessly, and in the greatest secrecy. We will see next year how we deal with this sudden occupation for our race of important bands. However, do not be discouraged from participating in the Spring Sprint next Easter /2016/ despite the difficulties that suddenly and unexpectedly fell upon us.
Hi, OM6SA