Monday, November 19, 2007

This was a travel day. In our packing, we inadvertently left a soldering gun in our carry on luggage. Wrong move! Tom had to explain to TSA officials not only the function of that “gun” but also a bit of ham radio (“…they still do that?” was their response, a bit uncertain of his explanation). Bottom line: the gun awaits our return at MSP.Then another problem arose upon our arrival in Miami where we went to the “wrong” Holiday Inn Airport. By the time we ended up in the “correct” H.I., over 3 hours had passed. We certainly were ready for “Miller time”.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Arising at 3:30 AM in Miami, we greeted the revelers who were just closing the bar at our hotel.Talk about groups with two different itineraries! We then took two flights to arrive at San Andres around 3 PM local time. We managed to install the Butternut HF2 vertical (80/40) just before sunset and to get in a couple of hundred contacts before going to bed.

Casualty: Bill’s Yaesu FT1000 MP was damaged in transit making it unusable. It appears that a blow to the front panel took place damaging the remote tuning knob. Needless to say, Bill is in mourning.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

This was our antenna day. Vlad and Tom worked in an empty lot with the task of assembling the Spider Beam (five band wire beam with 3 full-sized elements on all bands from 20 through 12 meters and 4 elements on 10 meters). Sounds, simple, right? Wrong. That lot had waist-high brush. Tom was tasked with borrowing a machete. The next 1.5 hours were spent by him bush-wacking a walking path to where the assembly would take place and clearing a work space for that assembly. Also paths had to be cleared for walking to trees that served as anchor points for the guying ropes.

When asked by Ron and Bill, how the machete-wielding went, Vlad and Tom were ready: “Only one snake was encountered in the brush but it’s OK now since Tom severed its head.” It wasn’t until dinner that the truth was told...

By the end of the day here was our station assembly status was:

Antennas:

160: The inverted L was physically installed but not tuned. Ron & Bill puzzled for quite some time about how to install it. On the upper deck, they ended up lashing a fishing pole on top of several 6 ft sections of 2 inch OD fiberglass rods to raise it to 65 feet above the ground. Then there was a question about what to do with the horizontal portion of the driven element. Bill and Ron drew lots about who would tie the wire to a roll of twine, throw it over a 30 ft coconut tree and then (drum roll) who would trudge through the brush-covered lot to tie it on the far end. Bill was tasked with the job. He heaved it over a 30 ft coconut tree. Bull’s eye: Perfect pitch.

80/40: The installed Butternut HF2 worked very well on 40 meters but 80 meters was poor. It’s suspected that we have an unsatisfactory ground plane.

Butternut HF9V: Assembled but not installed

K9AY loop: Not yet started

Station:

Run station: Icom 756 PROIII barefoot. Acom 1010 amplifier (not installed, awaiting 220 volts activation).

Mult Station: Icom 7000 barefoot.

Spotting station: None. Will be using the dial-up internet because of Bill’s damaged rig.

Thursday, Thanksgiving, November 22, 2007

Got a late start working on antennas while we lingered over breakfast.

We moved the HF2 to the upper deck with an elevated ground plan. That did wonders for 80 meters where we had pileups well into the wee hours of the evening/morning with Europe. That’s the good news. The bad news is that when 80 is being operated high power it interferes with 40. We’ll have to work on that for the contest.

Vlad meticulously spent the time to tune the 160m inverted L so that it had a 1.5:1 SWR using a combination of capacitors and inductors (wire wound around an empty beer bottle). We suspect that Vlad drained a few bottles in his effort to achieve the correct inductance (and we wonder why he took a long nap during the afternoon).

By afternoon, we were just about fully operational and spent our time operating.

By the time our dinner was ready at 7PM, we were certainly ready it. So, we had our Thanksgiving dinner with a non-turkey menu. Our housekeeper prepared a delicious dish with a freshly caught fish, fried plantains and coconut-flavored rice along with some beer. Afterwards, Ron took a swim in the Caribbean while the rest of us operated. That was quite an idyllic Thanksgiving evening for four hams. We’re not quite sure if our spouses would have enjoyed this type of Thanksgiving quite as much as we did.

After dinner, we worked hundreds of stations but found out that we had quite a bit of RFI raising havoc with computers and modems…We had to install a number of torroidal cores to tame the beast.

SHOWTIME: The CQWW Contest – As of Sunday Morning – 37 of 48  Hours of Operation

Well, the time finally arrived to do what we came here for – to operate in the CQWW DX Contest. You can look under the Operating Plan from the main page of this website to see which shift each of us had.

We were quite surprised at the level of activity. Initially, we felt that we would be semi-rare and the pileups would eventually taper off but that did not happen. As of this writing, we had the following contacts:

This means that we’ve averaged around 108 valid QSOs per hour. We’re on our way to our objective of 5,000 contacts.

One handicap that we had were the very high number of duplicate contacts (at least several hundred). We feel that this is because our call sign was confused with an “H” as the first character and not a “5”. Some of the spots were for HJØA. That dragged us down.

Other initial observations:

1. We needed an amplifier for the multiplier station. We spent a great amount of time (often unsuccessfully) to crack a pile up of needed multipliers.

2. Numerous occurrences of stray RF causing havoc with computers and peripherals. Fortunately, we brought plenty of torroids and were kept busy during contest as new demons popped up.

3. Lack of a good solid earth ground (especially on 160m) caused numerous RFI. Although we are within 300 yards of the surf, there is no good earth ground here. The top 2 feet of earth is very sandy. Underneath that is bedrock of coral. It got so bad on 160 meters, that RF knocked off the run computer and we had to have the multiplier station log as stations were worked.

4. Verticals. The same lack of a good earth ground affected the performance of these antennas. Only after we moved the Butternut HF2 antenna to an upper deck and installed a raised counterpoise with 66 and 32 foot radials, were we able to get effective results. The ground mounted HF9V performed sub-par.

5. The SpiderBeam was a winner. Full sized elements on all bands, full legal power, low wind profile, and portability. The only disadvantage was the lengthy assembly time. Also we mounted it 25 feet off the ground and had 3 elements on all bands except 4 on 10 meters.

6. Intermittent powerline noise. Needless to say, you know what that does to a run.

7. Frequent rain. Afterwards helps by cleansing the powerline insulators. But the storms were a temporary source of QRN.

8. Heat. Only our bedrooms are air conditioned and it gets stifling at the operating position.;

9. Due to space limitations, the verticals are within 30 feet of each other forcing us to construct an 40 meter stub (suck out filter) to permit 80 meters operation while another station was on 40 meters.

10. Pre-Contest Operation. We had over 3,000 contacts amongst us with Bill, WØOR,  Ron , NØAT and Vlad, NØSTL having over 1000 and the balance was by Tom, K3WT.

11. First Ever 60 Meter Contacts. We believe that we had the first ever 60 meter contacts from San Andres.  There were 20 lucky recipients.

12. Dial up internet worked well for communication as well as spotting info.

13. Bottom Line. We had a bunch of “woulda, coulda, shoulda” stuff but we couldn’t think of everything so we had to resort to our true roots of ham radio improvisation.

14. Ron, NØAT made the mistake of giving a deck of playing cards to the nine year old son of the caretaker who had a nine year old cousin. From that point, every time we walked outside, we were asked to play cards. That task fell to Tom, K3WT since he is somewhat conversant in Spanish. The kids were a joy, though. Very appreciative and friendly (but persistent). Look for an image of Tom, K3WT being snookered.

15. Legions of ants. The ants knew we were here and set up several columns of invaders. Even with spraying, they kept on coming in and crawling over our equipment. Plus, they had unbelievable reaction time when we tried to squash them. Extremely agile, to say the least. Speaking of insects, with the constant breeze of 20 mph, we did not have very many mosquitoes to content with (that made us Minnesotans rather homesick).

Epilogue

Well, all good things come to an end and so did the contest DXpedition.  We exceeded our QSO goal and would have done even better had there not been fairly widespread confusion of our call.  We were consistently spotted as HJØA.  The result:  Over 500 dupes!!  This had the twin effect of not only lowering our net rate but also could have prevented some multipliers from working us.  The vision of 6,000 QSOs were close to being a reality. Ahhh….the excuses!   As they say, “wait ‘til next DXpedition…”

The list of observations enumerated in the preceding section were a good summary of our experiences.

Preliminary results show us in the top 10 of multi-single stations.  The real margin of difference between our effort and those that finished higher boiled down to multipliers.  Next time, we’ll try to get an amplifier for the multiplier station.

In addition to the contest QSOs, we had over 3,500 HK0/homecall QSOs, with many on the the WARC bands, making around 9,000 QSOs overall.

One of the more humorous instances came after the contest was over during our last evening on the air (Monday). Around midnight local time, Ron, NØAT was trying to give some of the deserving a 160 meter QSO when he noticed that the amp was shutting down. Yelling for Vlad, NØSTL (our antenna guru) to go outside to see what was happening, we heard a loud boom and then a startled shout from Vlad…Vlad came running into the shack, somewhat shaken. 

What happened?  St. Elmo’s Fire! There literally was a fireball when Ron keyed the rig. Vlad thought he witnessed an extraterrestrial event. What actually happened was that over the week enough salt mist had  built up to create a conductive path between the two terminals of the matching capacitor eventually caused a short just in time for Vlad’s visit. Examination of the capacitor showed a gouged pathway between the two terminals.  Solution:  Vlad cleaned the capacitor and it worked fine. But that was a sign that it was almost time to shut down.  What a fitting ending…we went off the air in a ball of flames.

Highlights? Certainly the contest operation itself. But there was much more. The camaraderie is something only those who have been on a DXpedition can experience. The memories of San Andres, both the gracious people as well as the tropical locale will be something that we’ll all retain. The endless pileups were a joy that can’t be matched.  The first ever 60 meter QSOs were certainly noteworthy. All of that lays the groundwork for future DXpeditions. If you haven’t been on one, ya gotta do it. It’s a thrill of a lifetime! Thanks to all who contacted us and see you next time.

73 es Gud DX,

Bill, WØOR      Ron, NØAT     Tom, K3WT     Vlad, NØSTL