ES95E:

Estonian radioamateurs will celebrate the 95th anniversary of the Estonian Republic (Estonia's Independence Day is on February 24th) with ES95 special event stations on air from February 15th till March 3rd. More than 20 special calls will be introduced from the series ES95A to ES95Z representing different towns and regions of the country.

Specially designed QSL-cards will be available to confirm the contacts and also the amateur radio award "Eesti Vabariik 95" will be established. The preliminary info about the award is that it will be a pdf-award, free of charge and can be applied by those who have fulfilled contacts with at least 10 (or 5, if you are outside of Europe) different ES95 stations. More info about the award and its applying procedure will follow soon!

The ES95 operation is sponsored by an Estonian electronics start-up company Satrian, specialising in development of SDR devices. Please have a look at their web-page: www.satrian.com

Good luck in working different ES95 calls!

ES5TF:

I'm working mostly at the club station of Estonian Student Satellite project. Callsign of this club is ES5EC. The station is located at town Tartu, in southern Estonia. It's QTH locator is KO38ii.

At the moment, the equipment of the station is:

• Transceiver Kenwood TS-2000X
• Delta Loop antenna for 80 meter (but works well also on 40, 30, 12 and 6 meters), horizontal at the height of about 15 meter
• Tribander JP-2000 for 20, (17,) 15 and 10 meters
• Output power 100 W

Additionally, a M2 2-meter band yagi with 10m boom is installed on top of the JP-2000. For rotation of the JP-2000 and 2 m yagi stack a Yaesu G1000 rotator is used.

Sometimes I'm calling over the satellites, both FM and SSB ones. For that, the groundstation of our satellite project is more than enough - it consists of 4x18 el crossyagis for 70cm and 2x7 el crossyagis for 2m. We use there an Icom IC-910h. Even located inside the town, pushing close to limits is possible using such setup (e.g. QSO with AC0RA over AO-7: 7502 km).

I have used our club statition for contesting, participating in most major worldwide contest since 2009 and also in many European national contests. Now my new passion is to complete WAS - hard but not impossible with low power and at such distance.

Since March 2009, I use transceiver Yaesu FT-897D at home (locator KO38fg). Because of the room limitations - I can put antennas only on my balcony - only a small 4 element 2m yagi and a 70cm dipola have been in use on VHF-UHF. I installed also a simple wire "antenna" which even works (well, to be honest, about as well as would do a fork or hanger).

In the garden of my summerhouse in a very small town Loksa at Estonian northern coast (KO29un), a horizontal 40m delta loop antenna is deployed. The perfomance of this antenna and FT-897D+AT897 tuner seems to be very good - FB QSOs with USA and Japan confirm that. That QTH is located just outside the Lahemaa national park, known also as WFF-02 Till today, all ES5TF/2 QSO-s were made from that location.