After 6 full days of operation this is the first summary.
All team members are a little bit disappointed about the high noise level here on all bands, especially on the low bands from 160 m to 30 m. Levels are mostly around S7-9. We are sure the situation is much more worse than two years ago. It seems that this is man-made noise which is about 10 dB stronger between 5 pm and 7 am. It must be something like a machine or light-facilities in the hotel or the nearby golf-range. You might imagine what problems we have to identify call-signs under these lousy circumstances, which we are not able to solve. So with that we have to lower our expectations what means grey-line QSOs and our targets on the low-bands. To activate Macau on the lower bands will a more and more great challenge in the future.
We also have no good luck with the conditions – they were often unexpected bad. Generally we seem to be in or near the absolute minimum of the sunspot cycle. All our antennas are okay for the limited ground and under the given and possible circumstances. We got fair reports from all parts of the world. But it must be hard for the callers to break through the noise-wall on our side. Many callers wonder that they don’t through even with a kW. But when 90 % of all callers transmit exactly 1 kHz up in CW it is impossible for us to read anything. It`s not the “JA-wall” which is causing a problem. Bad comments don’t help. It’s more a question of bad practice. With the knowledge of the situation here many comments would have been unnecessary. By the: It’s a good practice to wait for the final confirmation before start to call us. You may trust us: We are working hard to get as many as possible callers in the log.
Because of the lousy conditions we work much more in FT8. Here we have a problem with correct logging from F/H mode when more than one station will be confirmed with RR73 in the same time slot. So many good QSOs are still missing and cannot be imported to our DXP log. The log will be corrected when we are back in Germany.
18000 QSOs from 160 to 6 m are in the log. The old valid band plan from Macau allows us only to transmit from 1800 to 1825 kHz. So we tried FT8 on 1815 kHz with QSX to 1840/1908 kHz. From time to time we have our CQ beacon on 50105 in CW or 50313 kHz in FT8 active. Please inform us shortly if we were heard anywhere.
The most important thing is that the team is in a good shape. We all like dxpeditionairing. Thanks again to all our supporters.
All team members are a little bit disappointed about the high noise level here on all bands, especially on the low bands from 160 m to 30 m. Levels are mostly around S7-9. We are sure the situation is much more worse than two years ago. It seems that this is man-made noise which is about 10 dB stronger between 5 pm and 7 am. It must be something like a machine or light-facilities in the hotel or the nearby golf-range. You might imagine what problems we have to identify call-signs under these lousy circumstances, which we are not able to solve. So with that we have to lower our expectations what means grey-line QSOs and our targets on the low-bands. To activate Macau on the lower bands will a more and more great challenge in the future.
We also have no good luck with the conditions – they were often unexpected bad. Generally we seem to be in or near the absolute minimum of the sunspot cycle. All our antennas are okay for the limited ground and under the given and possible circumstances. We got fair reports from all parts of the world. But it must be hard for the callers to break through the noise-wall on our side. Many callers wonder that they don’t through even with a kW. But when 90 % of all callers transmit exactly 1 kHz up in CW it is impossible for us to read anything. It`s not the “JA-wall” which is causing a problem. Bad comments don’t help. It’s more a question of bad practice. With the knowledge of the situation here many comments would have been unnecessary. By the: It’s a good practice to wait for the final confirmation before start to call us. You may trust us: We are working hard to get as many as possible callers in the log.
Because of the lousy conditions we work much more in FT8. Here we have a problem with correct logging from F/H mode when more than one station will be confirmed with RR73 in the same time slot. So many good QSOs are still missing and cannot be imported to our DXP log. The log will be corrected when we are back in Germany.
18000 QSOs from 160 to 6 m are in the log. The old valid band plan from Macau allows us only to transmit from 1800 to 1825 kHz. So we tried FT8 on 1815 kHz with QSX to 1840/1908 kHz. From time to time we have our CQ beacon on 50105 in CW or 50313 kHz in FT8 active. Please inform us shortly if we were heard anywhere.
The most important thing is that the team is in a good shape. We all like dxpeditionairing. Thanks again to all our supporters.
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