In the morning at my sunrise there was
simply no propagation on 40m phone/digital or 30m digital. I wasn’t too
concerned about this because the conditions to Europe on 20m were a better
option anyway.
I decided not to put up the 15m
vertical dipole because if the storm hit with the forecasted gale force winds
and destroyed the 20m and 15m vertical dipoles then the DXpedition would be a
complete failure. The troublesome HF9V was still OK for 15m with its SWR and so
I decided to leave the second 12m Spiderbeam fibreglass pole on the ground
until the storms passed in a couple of days.
I can’t describe how lucky I was to
fly in yesterday because there were terrible winds today and the forecast was
for the worst of them to be occurring over the next couple of days and so I
would have ended up having a 3 day DXpedition instead of 7 days.
The severe weather warning was spot on
and massive seas and winds hit the island. The HF9V was the first victim, while
it stayed vertical, the radials were a tangled mess of seaweed stuck in the
rocks and the coax was damaged. I tried fixing it and got 40m working again.
There was one point where a rogue wave hit me and I almost got swept onto some
nasty rocks. After that experience I figured that the risk wasn’t worth the
reward for 40m.
Power on the island comes from solar
panels and a large wind turbine that charge batteries which then go into an
inverter for 240V AC. Unfortunately the wind was so strong that the wind
turbine alarm was going off and the island resident said this might occur and
so I needed to disarm the wind turbine to prevent it from taken off and flying
into the Eyre Peninsula. There was obviously no sunshine and so now I had to be
conscious of power conservation as there’d be no power charging over the next
few days of the storm. Despite this I still operated the amplifier with 400
watts.
My operating position looked out over
the beautiful water of the bay short path to North America sweeping to the
right to long path Europe. Right in from on me was the 20m
vertical dipole and it wasn’t happy.
The top guy rope for the 20m vertical dipole was at the balun so that the coax
could run along one of the guys. This meant there was no guy rope for 5m from
the thin fibreglass tip at the top of the 12m mark down to the balun at the 7m
mark. This section was really under duress and we can thank the Germans for
making a quality product to survive the hours and hours of gale force winds –
well done Spiderbeam!
I commenced operating today at 0400
UTC on 20m and the European pile up was massive until 0830 UTC and this included
the occasional request to wait for North America to squeeze in some of the west
coast USA stations. By 0830 UTC the band started to close to Europe and a fun
mix of JA, Europe, North and South America occurred over the next hour. In the 0930-1100
UTC period I tried on 40m and 30m to no avail. It was too noisy with the storm.
After a break for dinner I headed back to 20m at 1100 UTC to look for North
America. Conditions weren’t as good but there was a slow trickle of East Coast
and Central North Americans going into the log.
At 1430 UTC it was now midnight local
and time for bed. I was up and at the dials at 2030 UTC (6:00am local) before
my local sunrise to try 30m. There were some European signals on the digital
modes but they couldn’t hear me, my CQ’s only resulted in a tiny run of JA’s.
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