V31GX in 2019

The VDA was in same place…. 20 sec view (in the dark!) seemed to indicate that the driven was not working properly and BOTH sides, so centre and outer of the feeder were bonded… how the heck that happened I dunno. Anyway, grabbed a PL239 dipole centre and made up a 20m gp fast, and put it up… and it worked 1st time, no time to think about other fixes it worked.

The sparking from the 80m and 40m coax was worrying and meant no 80m and 40m just when probably needed it…. maybe I need to think about lightening in next build

Still qrp I seemed to do OK. No BS really was just KX3 5W, prop was odd later in week some W5 guy said I was 599+20 and then 10 mins later 319 if lucky. QSB was complex mix of fast and slow too. I had a few qso with QRP guys in UK one he was not even 1W to an EFHW (using RG174) on 20m and he was on a hill so I KNOW propagation was there.

How the heck some of the mega guru DXers with all the antennas etc say they couldn’t hear me I dunno. On 20m RBN was saying I went from 46dB at one point with a GW to -1dB same station and I changed nothing ZL2iFB QSO on 20m as well. GL on the 4sq.

72 Dom M1KTA

Contest : RSGB Commonwealth Contest
Callsign : C6AKT
Mode : CW
Category : Single Operator (SO)
Overlay : —
Band(s) : All bands (AB)
Class : QRP
Zone/State/… :
Locator : FL15OJ
Operating time : 6h57

BAND QSO DUP DXC HQ POINTS BONUS AVG
——————————————–
80 10 0 4 3 50 200 25.00
40 20 0 4 5 100 280 19.00
20 59 3 17 7 290 700 16.78
15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.00
10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.00
——————————————–
TOTAL 89 3 25 15 440 1180 18.20
============================================

C6AKT

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by bobg3pjt in DXpeditions, News

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Hi all,

Back in UK since Sunday pm and unpacking through bit of jetlag. Might be
a day or so (got to be at the salt mines sadly earning more DX travel
tokens) but I’ll create a report for Bob et al.

In short tnx for adding me to team Carribean hope I wasn’t too far off
the pace.

Barring logging errors I should have c85-90 QSO in the log. Pretty sure
I logged the HI9/F… stn as non-Beru doh! Not too bad show given
conditions as a QRP station, zero internet so unassistaed not that it
would have made any difference the local mobie tower was taken out it
seems. I was QRT for much of the last 5 hours through thunderstorms so
missed the expected G run on 40m sadly. I had no choice after couple
close strikes once the first storm passed over just after midnight but
the two 80m and all four 40m GP’s for the 4SQ HAD to come down, the coax
was sparking to ground. Must work out how I might keep them up next time?

The 20m VDA was replaced by a simple 20m GP that I put right at the
waters edge that performed much better, got to work that one out for
sure as should have been the other way around!

Dom

M1KTA/C6AKT

BERU 2018 – 9H3ET

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by bobg3pjt in DXpeditions, News, Reports

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From: Peter Hobbs
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 17:04:36 GMT

Some very interesting posts so far – thanks to all. And good performances under very difficult conditions! For 2018, I returned to Gozo for another Restrricted Unassisted bash as 9H3ET, this time hosted by Colin 9H4CT and his wife Sue – thanks so much to both of them! Their villa is located in San Laurenz, with an excellent take-off across the Med in the favoured directions between NW and S. And as Colin was also looking after the villa next door in the owner’s absence, use was made of their attached small field. Colin had provided an advance plan of the combined site, which allowed for the construction of a custom multi-band wire vertical to be slung from a catenary erected between the roof and my 12m spiderpole, which Easyjet had consented to stow as normal checked baggage. The lower 8 sections of the 12m was mounted on top of an existing 5.7m length of water pipe, giving an overal height of around 45 ft. This left something lacking on 80m and so the balance was arranged to form part of the catenary.

I also brought along a 40m dipole for the UK, which was erected inverted-V style from the combined mast. Colin’s 15m dipole, already in place some distance away, was used for receiving and allowed me to practice some rudimentary SO2V, when combined with my set of ((hitherto unused) 5B4AGN filters. This facility, along with my Elecraft P3, helped find several bonuses that would otherwise probably have been missed, although lack of experience in the overall technique gave rise to some issues while running – apologies to those on the receiving end of these!

The vertical was fed against tuned counterpoises around 80cm above some nicely watered ground, thanks to rain the previous week and the combined antenna system proved adequate to easily work Nigel on all bands, with excellent signals.

The main gremlin, discovered a couple of hours into the event, was that I had “lost” the cat control port to the K3 and had been operating mainly 20m while logging on the default band of 80m. I discovered this after successfully moving with Brian 9J2BO from 15m to 10m and being rewarded with a dupe! Frantic attempts to recover from this situation being unsuccessful, many of my eventual legit 80m QSOs were also signalled as dupes, to the extent that a number of the further G’s I called on 20m turned out to be real dupes. More apologies are in order here! And thanks to Paul for his very timely support to SD this morning.

Back to the event, it was necessary to at least attempt to run for much of the event as so many of the available QSOs were G’s and without the SO2V facility bonuses would have been pretty thin on the ground. Most of the bands seem to be occupied either by the Tesla event or a range of popular dxpeditions and it only slowly became clear that some of these might be worthy of attention. The P3 is magic at breaking pileups because you can locate XIT exactly where the last station was worked, assuming of course that there is propagation. It worked well with the V2 and 9Y4 without incurring unacceptable delays.

Overall, 8 QSOs and bonuses were netted on 15m and 3 on 10m, with the other main excitement being the dawn VK/ZL opening on 40m, which extended for longer than usual. In comparison, 20m produced comparatively little. The night hours were, as usual, unbearably slow but did produce bonuses. The QSO meter continuously dropped in a most discouraging way and I crept unbearably slowly towards 500, with more than 40 being reported as dupes. The final total was 546, with a claimed score of 5225, well down on 2017 in all departments. And 2019 is predicted to be no better. Still, the whole exercise, from the initial planning, to taking down the mast and packing everything away this morning, was most enjoyable, as always! Thanks to the many G’s who called and others who cheerfully put up with my various idiosyncrasies.

73, Peter G3LET

ZF2CA

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by bobg3pjt in DXpeditions, News, Reports

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I arrived late Wednesday to put in 2^nd prep day at the station to get SO2R working properly with this year’s investment in a Microham MK2R+, and also to make sure I was reasonably topped up on sleep. Good job as hours were lost trying to get CAT control of the 2^nd radio working but I think static damage had done for it, so it was in Dumb Radio mode. Lost a few friends learning how to work the combo earlier this year, but it’s kind of there now. Microham support is great, Win-Test support seems to have gone into retirement.

Did some beacon monitoring Thur and Fri so knew when the bands would open, especially 15. Except of course, it barely did on the day and was late arriving even then. At times it was reasonable, but signals have to be present too! It was the two on 10m that made me smile, particularly as VE3EJ who found me out of nowhere. He had to have had a skimmer watching as I was only there on a QSY visit, which itself was a nice surprise. Even the 20m opening to VK/ZL was late arriving. Reasonable when it did though I learned again that signals in ZF often do not arrive by great circle routes; should have been almost due West but needed to be due South – off the side of the beam if you are not watching out. And turning via North.

If only the QRN had been kinder on 80m Sunday morning, true S9+20 most of the time, no matter which antenna. You do not expect to have to struggle to work G4PIQ in the morning. I’m sure there were loads I could not hear, apologies.

On 80 for receiving I had the choice of the 2-ele or the Shared Apex Loop Array or beverages for EU and US. In the end I settled for diversity with the 2-ele and mostly the SA loop and let my head sort out the mess as the signals and QRN danced around each other in a 3D soundscape. Try it if you get the chance.

Lost a few minutes at the start on 80m owing to high antenna SWR – Nooooo! Must be my switch box; quickly find another piece of co-ax and route around it. Knew I should have uprated it for 1kW working, though it seemed ok last year? Still 3:1 and linear tripping. AND on the dipole. What’s wrong?????? Bugger – had accidentally put K3 in ‘Split’ so had been CQing on 3795; explained the slow start. Entering ‘split’ too easily is one of the K3’s few ergonomic faults.

The club station at ZF1A has been upgraded to include high power band filters and tri- or quadplexers for the antennas, with antenna switching so you can beam in one direction or multiple simultaneously, selectable per band. This is a luxury that is a great investment, even if installing it on a large wooden board did cost the view out of the window.

I’ve got the food preparation down to a finer art of pre-packed sandwich bags and can almost eat without stopping in the quieter times, though crumbs in the keyboard remain a hazard. This year’s choice was half a round each of cheese and peanut butter or of ham and peanut butter, which I find very contest friendly. A 4-bar Twix was handy as individual treats after long pile-ups. Fluids were water, a large flask of coffee and two flavours of fruit smoothie; Mighty Mango and Berry Blast. Add a banana and a Corners yogurt and it was almost a balanced diet. No micro-ants this year so immediate washing up was less of a burning priority that it had been last year. Though at one point a large caterpillar crawled around the top of the Win-Test screen and gave me a fright…

Sleep is now rationed to one 90 minute deep cycle and some unwitting microsleeps especially in the last hour; there is no good time except with hindsight. But I can see from the scoring rate charts that some just don’t seem to need sleep. Beats me how they do that.

Again almost nothing from the Far East. Must work harder looking for them next time.

Travelling was mostly straight forward with the same route in as last year, via a prospect – now a customer – in Reedsburg, Wisconsin (population 10,000), which involved driving through a white-out as evening fell to night; somewhat scary. Travellers’ tummy appeared but settled soon after getting to ZF. Now already in the US and having TSA pre-check meant my entire baggage (K3, MK2R+, antenna switchbox, keyer, key, +etc only in carry-on as always) all passed through the final security check without additional inspection. There is no rhyme or reason. Though the K3 now has a war wound from the heavy key. This year’s route home is via Las Vegas, Winnipeg and San Diego, so there is yet opportunity for some airport security excitement.

I was due to meet the next party to use ZF1A mid-day Sunday, though they are late to the shack owing to their baggage having been lost on the way…

80 66

40 242

20 227

15 49

10 2

Claimed score 6630

See you all next year!

73 Colin ZF2CA (G4CWH)

BERU 2018 V31GX

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by bobg3pjt in DXpeditions, News, Reports

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From: Iain g4sgx
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 16:07:36 GMT

Hello fellow Beru-ites.

Decided to come back to Belize again relatively late this year. I had gone a fair way to organising a trip to Sierra Leone but was cancelled quite late due to national elections there. The government cancelled my licence application due to ‘security concerns’. (Most of Africa is not normally a good place to visit during elections.) I had the advantage of knowing my QTH well and an old log to compare with. The locals were happy to help me erect my 12M spiderpole and had no problem with wires all over the place. I intended to improve the station with some RX antennas but only had time to put up a quick BOG which didn’t actually work in the end. For some reason after adding a pre-amp the noise was even worse on 80M than the inverted-L, probably due to its proximity to buildings. I have yet to try an Delta shaped loop which I shall play with in my remaining time.

Last year my 40M trap failed (capacitor) but this year I swapped it for a higher Vmax surface mount RF cap which worked perfectly, no need to build a quick 40M dipole mid-contest this time.

I missed out on he first hour due to slack time keeping. For some reason I thought last year I was 5 hours behind but it seems I was a hour out thus I started at 11:00 Z and lost some VE’s on 80M.

I found conditions well down on last year, nothing on 10M despite a few QSY requests.

No G’s on 15M at all this year despite trying quite hard at the right times. The VK/ZL path was there the same as before but the long path seemed much stronger than Vocap predicts and the SP weaker. I always leave HamCap running so I can see available paths open, always find it very accurate.

Had a bit of a part time effort, took 2 hours off mid contest when it was SLOW to go shopping and visit a restaurant.

40M is noisy but 80M was terrible. Constant S9 crashes. Sounded like storms but also a bit like splatter, still unsure of its origin. I am now looking at the local cellphone mast which is only 300M away with some suspicion! If I didn’t ask you for repeats several times on 80M you were one of the rare few. Very hard work, lots of ESP needed to pick out serials in between crashes and constant fiddling with the K3 filters, first time I have ever had to use the NR button in anger. Worked well on strong sigs but buried weaker ones.

Surprise of the day was to work 3B8XF on 40m at a time it really shouldn’t have been possible.

Took an hour off towards the end due to tiredness,came back to rinse 40M of G’s then packed in 2 hours before then end when it quitened down.

Numbers well down on last year, mostly due to dire conditions I think rather than my part time effort and holiday style operating.

Band QSOs Pts Cty Sec Pt/Q

3.5 34 625 17 4 18.4

7 137 1940 53 7 14.2

14 117 1625 41 7 13.9

21 25 425 14 2 17.0

Total 313 4615 125 20 14.7

Score: 4,615

1 Mult = 2.2 Q’s

73 Iain V31GX/G4SGX

Pictures from Sabah

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by g3vyi in DXpeditions, News, Reports

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Heres the antennas at 9M6GY’s QTH used by 9M6/G3VYI, the sky is blue but we had 1 foot of rain just before the contest!

Hi all, struggled with local rain static noise at times but enjoyed all the VK and ZLs, very different here! Worked as many Gs as I could , no Caribbean and a just a few VE s ,as expected, but after bands closed overnight at 3am z here it was very slow to open again, like my brain ! Nothing on 40m in the morning here .

185 QSOs, 17 on 80, 65 on 40, 74 on 20, 22 on 15m, 4 on 10m, The station was 400w with hexbeam and 40m dipole at 50 ft plus 80m wires.., lots of repeats needed as FT920 here not the greatest on LF !

Hope you get it fixed ok Don, big signal here on 80/40.Just back with the xyl after a farewell meal with our kind host Godfrey 9M6GY

BERU still the best contest !

mike 9M6/G3VYI