Category Archives: DXpeditions

V31GX travelling home to beat the virus!

25 Wednesday Mar 2020

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Hello,
Back from Belize now to sunny North Norfolk but it was only just..

The day after I arrived, they banned any more Europeans from entering and Mr.Trump set up his ban on arrivals from EU unless they had been away for 14 days, which was a problem because all flights go via the USA to England from Belize and USA has no real transit area, you have to physically enter the USA and go through immigration customs etc.
No sweat I thought, at least I got in and it just means another extra week in Belize, not a problem, so I ordered another flight. Alas I could not get a refund for the first return flight.
About 2 days into my second week, five days to go before returning, there were rumors about Belize closing the land borders, despite having no cases of the virus confirmed as yet.
The next day I received a message from my hosts, which was sent to them from a government friend, that all the land borders will close at 4pm the next day and the airport a day after that. (Before my ticket home).
Left with no choice, I got into a taxi the next morning to the Mexican border, walked across and then found a bus to Cancun with the hope of getting a flight out from there, being a much larger and busier airport than Belize and it was in the back of my mind that if I did get stuck, Mexico was probably a better place as it had more infrastructure.

I booked the only flight out to London from Cancun, going via Canada. Due to number of people also trying to escape, all tickets were full for days apart from Business Class, which I reluctantly bought as again I was running out of options.
The day of departure, I got a phone call from a friend, who was trying to help some friends stuck in Panama, telling me that Canada had just closed its borders to non Canadians.
Its OK, I thought, I’m transit and Toronto has a proper transit area but when I tried to Check in online it refused me, stating the new travel restrictions.
I went to the airport where the lady at the Air Canada desk agreed new rules were in place since that morning and I would have to contact the airline directly to arrange a refund.
Now thinking waiting for repatriation was my last and only hope, I just tried to check in anyway, with one of the machines. To my great surprise it printed out two boarding passes but stated I would have to speak to check in assistance to confirm.
Fearing the worst I queued up anyway. By this time confidence was running low and expected to be turned down but they just waved me through.
Waiting for the plane, it was repeatedly delayed by 1/2 hour several times, so was still worrying about a last minute cancellation.
There were plenty other Europeans in my situation waiting for the plane, from all over South and Central America, looking for that elusive non USA bound transit flight to EU.
Finally they let me on and we left Cancun and I transited to London with no problems.

I’m lucky that I’m fairly used to thinking on my feet, having travelled quite a lot in 3rd world countries in my youth but even I acknowledge that was a close thing..

I still have no idea what happened toward the end but someone was smiling on me.

Iain V31GX/G4SGX

World Travellers

23 Monday Mar 2020

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Hi Bob,

As an update, Team World Travellers are now all home or on their last journey legs apart from Team sub Richard G3RWL/8P6DR who is staying in 8P6 for a while longer as he originally planned.

I think we have all had to alter our travel arrangements to get out of locations before borders or airports close on us, but Iain G4SGX/V31GX has had the most harrowing journey involving a route via two other countries. I will let him describe better in his own words.

73, Colin G4CWH again.

 

VP5O

19 Thursday Mar 2020

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Sorry Bob, I sent a brief run-down to Colin CWH, our team captain for World Travellers but fogrot it hadn’t gone to you too!  Well done by the way on your own effort, excellent signals on 4 bands.
The decision to go to Turks & Caicos was largely driven by increasing inability to cart multiple large suitcases around the styx, hence the need to find what is essentially a ready-made station, in other words a rental shack.  After a number of fruitless enquiries, I settled on Jim Jordan’s very nice villa  on Providenciales, which is equipped with a basic Elecraft setup, together with a SteppIR 3el with 40/30m loop and a rather low 80m dipole.  It soon became clear that this setup had been largely tuned towards the ARRL events rather than CQWW, which would need to perform in all directions.
The benefit of the SteppIR is that it can be configured as a dipole by retracting the director and reflector elements, leaving me with what I had thought would be rotary dipoles for 10, 15, 20 and 40m.  Unfortunately (not declared until after I had arrived) the rotator had ceased to exist some months previously and turning it by Armstrong method wasn’t really on at relatively advanced age and degree of decrepitude.  Nevertheless, a couple of hours using this together with the barefoot K3 appeared sufficiently promising to consider a Restricted entry.  The villa is high up with outstanding sea views to the north and north east and this probably helps.  Having switched off the pool pumps and pulled a variety of wall warts (the shack only accounts for a small propertion of lettings) the site also proved nice and quiet.  I had  brought along my own P3 which was  missing from the station but I was disappointed to find that there was no second receiver fitted to the K3.  CAT control, which has been the bain of recent events, was however faultless.
We arrived at 7PM on the thursday before BERU and had just enough time to visit the local weekly Fish Fry event, a mile along the beach road before collapsing for the night.  Luckliy, Jim had run ARRL SSB the weekend before and had left everything pretty well set up, so it was only necessary to create a new SteppIR antenna with collapsed parasitic elements.  This took longer than anticipated because it had to be done separately for each band and then the driven element optimised for SWR.  Still the station was ready to go  by mid-afternoon on Friday, soon followed  by an early retirement.
Well, it’s true, keeping awake for 24 hours when approaching one’s dotage is non-trivial!  I really struggled over the last 6 hours, but then there wasn’t so much going on anyway as the end approached.  Looking at the log, it doesn’t look as though I napped for longer  thasn asbout 15 minutes.  Hard to comment rationally on conditions, having no experience of the station here but 80 in particular was disappointing to the UK, with lots of absorption.  I spent ages trying to make it with Nigel but signals were too poor and fluttery.  40 was marginal and nothing heard from him on the HF bands.  15 was open on and off all day to the UK and the P3 came in really handy to catch the “on” times.  I also spent an unreasonably long time chasing VP2VB and finally made it on 2 bands.  Signals were never wonderful on 15 and so i never  bothered with 10m.  Had the dipole been rotatable it might have been worth looking for Brian 9J2BO but the QSO with him on 15 was marginal anyway.
VSWR was quite manageable with 100 watts on all bands but I’m not sure how it would have worked with higher power. For me, a highlight was following the other Nigel 6Y5HN, who was a regular in the ’90’s but not heard since, so his “guest” entry this year was quite special.
So here we go:
80 – 101 QSOs, 36 bonus, 0 dupes
40 – 280 QSOs, 71 bonus, 3 dupes
20 – 253 QSOs, 48 bonus, 4 dupes
15 – 46 QSOs, 16 bonus, 0 dupes
Total 680 QSOs, 171 bonus and 6820 points.
I was disappointed not to have made either 700 QSOs or 7k points but there was literally nothing to be had in the last hour.
Thanks to all for the QSOs, everyone in the World Traveller Team seemed to be doing very well, although some of the numbers being  touted by the big Canadians were pretty frightening.  I think there’s little doubt they will walk off with the team competition this year as most of the VK/ZL  numbers were comparatively low this year.
73, Peter

ZF2CA – Coda

17 Tuesday Mar 2020

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Hi Bob,

So I managed to get a place on the BA flight that leaves Friday as the US leg of my trip had to be cancelled. The breaking news is that Cayman airport will shut from Sunday evening for three weeks, so we should get out ok. I believe most of the other Caribbean islands  are or have done similarly.

The cruise ships stopped last Friday for two months and so the largely Indian-sourced tax free jewellery shops at the port are empty and offering up to 70% discounts. Rubies anyone?

Most attractions are shut or are shutting from the end of the week.

Those who know me well know I’m not particularly religious, although I am somewhat a fatalist, that certain things seem to happen for unexplained reasons. Imagine as I was pounding away seeing a text about the news that US-UK flights were off, but I just dug in, though wondering if I had my priorities right. But  shortly after that when I sent serial 666 – the Devil’s number – the response that came back – wait for it – 66. Make of that Faustian hint what you will.

73, Colin ZF2CA

 

ZF2CA

16 Monday Mar 2020

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ZF2CA 2020The World Travellers team has been discussing the merits and demerits of finding yourself in a strange shack with a couple of days to go before the contest is due to start. There are always issues.

The plusses this year are that the team of US regulars visiting ZF1A have been improving the antennas by swapping some out and adding more,  and adding further switching and triplexing/quadruplexing so that any band can access any antenna at any time. Joy!

The trouble is that the antennas are big and the winds strong and there are always rotator issues. This year was no exception. The huge (400kg) log periodic is now regarded as ‘fixed toward W6’ and ‘the 2-ele 80m beam has stripped its gearbox again, we leave it pointed North held with ropes, though we have added a 2-ele 40m beam underneath it’.

And then there’s the sundry stuff. I can report doing 3 hours aircon repair training Friday morning, but however failing my finals by lunchtime. Still the ever resourceful host Andrew Eden got a man out and had it sorted by the time I turned up 4am Saturday morning, thank heavens. Doing the last day’s prep at 90 moist degrees and with reduced time was not on the project plan.

I have now brought an underused Tokyo High Power amp out that will stay here and it worked fine despite whatever impact was required during transit to cause one of the 4CX250Bs to come clean out of its socket. And this year XYL Helen has a zero-year birthday on the 14th March itself, though I am not allowed to say which one dah-di-di-di-dit so she has come out to join me. She acted as a fine mule, bringing the 2nd K3 in carry-on and putting the THP in the hold. As usual I went via several  US customer  meetings but Helen came on her own via Miami. Her total training was “Smile sweetly at the girl on the counter as the amp weighs 24kg with a 23kg limit, and put the K3 in its own tray –  you’ll be just fine. Just remember there is ’no lithium’ in the THP, that is all they will ask about” Despite some trepidation, it all worked to plan.

So technical improvements over last year:

  • The Microham SO2R controller RF lock-up problem is fixed with a tragically placed capacitor inside – they have definitely not got RF grounding right, in our out.
  • I have switched to DxLog and, well, saying I’ve mastered it is just a lie, but I push buttons and it seems to work.
  • Beaten myself up with Morserunner set at 40wpm. It does help, though when tired I get bouts of ‘2nd language blindness’ and seem at times to have to decode individual letters.

SO2R is working and is now operator limited.

Operating BERU from the Caribbean starts on 80 then 80/40 and you work all the big VEs and some VK/ZLs. Then something happens and when you emerge in the sunlight on 20 at noon they are always 1-200 Qs ahead. After all the prep and travel and set-up, this comes as the big spiritual test and this student continues to ponder on it.  Somehow you have to try to remember that paths allow a degree of catch-up Sunday morning, the only problem being having to do this on ‘empty’. I am quite sure some of you were repeating serials with no reply owing to my being asleep at the wheel.

Conditions: nothing on ten except some LUs; 15 a real curate’s egg with some patches very good (from memory G4BUO and GW6XX in particular) and a decent run to VK/ZL as predicted. What I didn’t predict was some super loud scallywag calling me by name and sending me halfway up the band to absolutely nothing. 20 worked fine and open very late, my last G was at 22.05, though noise is becoming a problem limiting the weaker stations. I think some lost confidence that I had confirmed as I got ten dupes from stations often with low serials. 40 was good though hard to find rarer stations, but 80 a bit weaker than normal; fortunately QRN was low that can otherwise be devastating here, think I could have done more VK/ZL… next year.

Scores:

Band    QSO    Bonus     Dupes

80        131         32          2

40        262         61          3

20        292        51          10

15          57        37            1

Points broken – we’ll have to wait and see.

Colin ZF2CA

Carribean 15m path to VK/ZL

11 Wednesday Mar 2020

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Hi Bob,

Last year I’d been intermittently bashing away to an empty 15m band when at 22:35 UTC ZL3PAH answered making the radio all but jump off the table. I’ve just been doing some analysis of my signals on RBN and that path was seemingly wide open from 20:30 until then and >25dB S:N continuously from 20:45 to 21:40. Readings only stopped because I would have had to rush off for the 40m G-run, so I don’t know when it actually closed. FYI really, but save to say many mults were missed by both ends.

 

73 Colin ZF2CA

VK2/G3VYI QSO

09 Monday Mar 2020

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On Saturday, 7 March 2020, 21:55:27 GMT, Bob G3PJT <bob@g3pjt.com> wrote:
G’day Mike
Good to hear you! About 4-5 3 9 sort of signal so pretty good I would
say for 80w and vertical, close to the noise floor but readable. At this
end 400w to a 2 element vertical beam.
I had a Q with Barry VK2BJ too, he peaked at about 57/89 easily loud
enough for a chat. So looks like  good conditions for short path.
Hope the hols are going OK – speak to you next weekend.
73 Bob G3PJT

Thanks Bob, yes not  bad  for 33ft vert  and a few radials in  campsite, you were solid…no  noise here

 you were 559 579, we have now  moved  south to Victoria, from Sydney ( I was VK2 )  and hope  to finda good location  for the contest  from  the campervan hoho
cu  in BERU
73
Mike

ZF2CA on Camb Hams reflector

08 Sunday Mar 2020

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As usual I am attending ZF as ZF2CA to try to win the Senior Rosebowl in the RSGB Commonwealth Contest aka ‘BERU’ while the sunspots remain low, the best chance against the VE superstations.

If any of you want to lend  hand these are the best time to try based on analysis of last year’s RBN:

Sat 14th 10:00 – Sun 15th 10:00 UTC, CW

80m 00:00 – 01:00, 07:00 – 08:00

40m 23:00 – 00:00, 08:00 – 09:00

20m 12:00 – 13:00, 17:00 – 18:00

15m 12:30 – 13:30, 16:00 – 17:00

10m 13:30 – 14:30 (Just a guess: good luck to you! This year I promise to have the rx antenna actually connected….) For the most part I will be on any given band prior to the peak, to clean out the strong ones and spread the pileup (or my rate drops through the floor – schoolboy lesson learned a few years ago).

Last year’s winner was VY2ZM who runs 4 stacked yagis up to 200ft pointed at Europe…..  Need all the help I can get.

73 Colin ZF2CA, G4CWH