Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

XX9D - DX Pediton News

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  •  

    XX9D - DX Pediton News

    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.
    73 Al 4L5A
  •  

    #2
    The 2019 XX9D adventure has come to an end. A good end for all members of the crew after arriving safely and in a good shape at home. No damaged equipment, no problems with the customs and the airlines, no health-problems….

    So far so good....We didn't meet the targets we set ourselves and we are very sorry about that. We and probably the DX-world has expected more despite the actual sun-spot conditions. With the experiences of the 2017-expedition in our background we expected to do much better with a bigger team and upgraded antennas. We knew about the limited space situation in our hotel, but we didn't know about the 'improved' illumination- and machinery situation with a dramatically increase of man-made noise there.

    There was no way for us to run out of the given situation, we had to cope with a noise-level of 9+ during the night time and 10 dB less through daylight time on 160 m to 30 m. We knew that we had solid signals on those bands and it made us more than sad to be able picking up only a small percentage of the stations calling us.

    The team was fighting until the last minute, it was often more a puzzle than solid call-sign-picking.

    As promised, North America was our main target, we worked hard but with 8,5% we were far behind that what we expected. But better than 2017!

    Conditions on the higher bands were poor as forecasted. Although we tried SSB, but with only a little fortune. 5 to 10 minutes without any respond led us often to go back to CW or FT8.

    We appreciated all comments, hints and criticism via e-mail. Most of the comments expressed their understanding of our situation, many others encouraged us and gave us a positive feedback. A few others, a minority, gave us unqualified comments, often with fake call-signs. We would like to ask them: Come here, spend your money for a trip to Macau and make it better.

    Our equipment with K3s-transceivers, microHam MKIIs and SPE-Experts, our pentaplexer and the filter-cascades for multi-band-operation worked fine without any distortions ore failure. The same with the UCXLog in network operation and the WSJT-X-software. Our new lightweight 5-Band- 2 Element-wire-beam from LZ Antennas is a good option for DXpeditions, we were very satisfied with that.

    Finally we had around 36000 QSOs in our logbook on all bands and possible modes included more than 1000 on top band and nearly 5000 on 80 m. There is still some work to be done to integrate all FT8-QSOs from F/H-mode in our main log. Thanks Joe K1JT and Bill G4WJS for helping us with a new WSJT-X 2.0.1 version.

    Please be patient and wait until we have completed the logs on ClubLog. QSO-requests please only to our QSL-manager DL4SVA!

    On behalf of the whole team we would like to express a big Thank you to all our supporters. We are preparing a photo-collage for You.

    Last but not least we should mention the 6 XYLs we had with us. They have had a lot of fun using the sport- and recreation facilities of the hotel, practicing Yoga, walking around in Macau and spending money in Macau’s gorgeous shopping-malls. They helped us in moments of frustration and were good guides and companions on our tours to Hong Kong and more. Therefore also a big Thank you to our XYLs.
    73 Al 4L5A

    Comment

    Working...
    X