01/12/2007
Back from EA8
I arrived home safely after a 14 hour trip. Most of that time was spent waiting. 1 hour 30 minutes in a road block in Las Palmas on the way to the airport in the morning, 1 more hour on Las Palmas airport, almost 3 hours on the plane to Madrid, 6 hours on Barajas airport, two hours 50 minutes flight to Amsterdam. Not to forget the 1 1/2 hour drive home.
Looking back at the operation we can be quite satisfied with the results. Working in the multi/multi class we made almost 10k qsos and almost 20 Million points. The location in the city of Las Palmas turned out to be sub-optimal for multiband contesting. Especially 160 meters , where I spent almost 8 hours was bad, if not impossible to operate. We ended up listening on the 20 meters quad radiator, and even then only the big guns could be heard. Many thanks to those who took the time to contact us using the 'callsign guessing procedure'.
20 and 15 were good, 40 reasonable and 80 mediocre. 10 meters was hardly open from our location at EA8URL.
600 meters higher than our location EF8A was working multi/2, and some test contacts before the contest showed that they were at least 10 dB stronger than us on all bands, resulting in a score of over 30 Million...
After the contest we were able to visit them, and we could see why. This mountain top station is a professional job, and they will certainly be a force to reckon with in the years to come!
Anyway, we had loads of fun, and the team proved to be excellent. I am looking forward to next year's CQWW-CW...
Rein PA0R
13:55 Posted in contesting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
23/11/2007
Twelf hours to go...
Well, the platform arrived yesterday afternoon, and it was too high to enter the drive way. But after 2 steel constructed pergolas were dismantled the 2o meters quad and the 10 meters beam coiuld be repaired. The 160 meters inverted L works fine on the roof, although I think we will build an extra rx antenna for listening, as the noise is S7 (preamp off).
I could work some EU stations quite early on 160 yesterday, while it was still light here.
Here is a pic of the antenna situation here...
Spirit is high, and we are now qrv on 3 bands testing the antennas using home calls....
CU in the pile-ups
73,
Rein EA8/PA0R
12:47 Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
21/11/2007
The virtues of CW contesting (who needs fieldday?).
I am writing this in one of the shacks of EA8URL in Las Palmas. We (DK3QZ, DLiEMH, DK3QQ, DL3KAH, DL5XX and myself) are planning to operate the CQWW-CW from this QTH. At this moment 3 of the 4 stations are ready (including the computers) and all antennas work except that the 20 meter quad has a broken reflector, the 10 meters 4-el monobander is tuned to 27.4 MHz and we still need to build a dipole for 160m.
But we still have 3 days to go and the weather is nothing like at home. Day temperature is a solid 24 degrees, which goes down to 22 degrees during the night. It is really nice to make a morning stroll down the beach before breakfast, and eat out on the beach in your t-shirt while your xyl is putting another log onto the fire at home.
Had a nice run on 17m yesterday afternoon for one and a half hours, the first eQSL has already arrived. I am curious what the long band antennas do. Maybe we need to put up some receive anatennas. Until now it looks like the qrm at this down town hilltop qth is reasonable.
We are now assembling a second 10 meter yagi. We don't know the distance between the elements, so better go look in the library (the URL is well equipped with books). Today the highworker which has been promised to come 'manana' for the last 3 days will come to enable the repairs.
Must hurry....
Rein EA8/PA0R
12:10 Posted in contesting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
11/08/2007
Message from the front line..
Saturday, 9:30 local.
We are at the Chaos Computer Camp, some 50 km north of Berlin, Germany.
And we are surrounded by hackers, some 3000 of them. That also means some 5000 computers and 10.000 network cables, also in the wireless::village where I live.
The atmosphere in the camp is completely different from what we are seeing at the Ham Radio camp in Friedrichshafen. The average age of a hacker seems to be around 22, and you know you are talking to a ham when the person is over 50. 50% of the hackers wear their long hair in a tail, and the standard dress is baggy shorts and T-shirts with interesting messages on them. And from most of the big tents you can hear the onk-onk-onk of 2kW audio woofers, all asynchronously outputing the same type of 'music' until 4:00 local. The days of Howling Wolf, John Mayall and Eric clapton seem long gone.... By the way, the equipment is so good you cannot hear the pskmail beacons on it.
The food you can buy is esoteric at best. No solid hamburgers but indian curry, tomato noodles, crepes and ah... bratwurst (saves the day). All people here feel they are part of an army, and the enemy is the government, the industry, Microsoft(TM), the police, politicians, C++, and the establishment at large. The world is ok here, divided in 85% Linux, 15% windows. And most speakers openly pity the people who have to work for M$ to earn their money. And most campers here have taped off part of the licence plate so if the anti-terror administration comes to video everything they won't be recognized. All in all this gives a warm feeling of togetherness.
We are well prepared. All laptops have a tight firewall, and we have been warned to back up all computers before connecting to the network, and remove all personal information from any hard disk present. After being here for 5 days now pskmail still has not been hacked, so it must be reasonably secure.
10:00 and I am looking at the fldigi screen. No beacons on 30. Since the start of the conference on wednesday the S-meter of the FT897D is at a steady S8-9. Which means that I can send APRS beacons, but I cannot hear the QSL's. I can check on findu that the beacons get through o.k.
PA3DSC is also here. We use pskmail APRS messaging to chat. For that I have hacked the code so that the messages are also displayed when no server can be reached... This works well over a distance of 200 meters as his signal is S9++.
10:10 the first hackers are leaving their tents to have the first sanitary and buy the first coffee. They don't look healthy, must be due to the evening before. But that will change until 11:00 when the first lecture is scheduled ('Hacking WEP in 60 minutes'). Then they will be in one of the big hangars of this former military airport, with their laptop charged so they can read the latest news during the speech.
This is our last day here and I have to hurry. Still have to do the dishes and must be in time for the lecture.
So far the stay here has been quite succesfull. 5 demos, 2 newspaper interviews, 1 radio interview, got more people interested... Somebody interested to start a server in Italy. More than I hoped for.
Looking forward to seeing the S-meter drop to zero when this is all over. But it is good to know pskmail would actually work as soon as the network went down...
10:31 Posted in PSK-mail development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
19/01/2007
Antennaless in Eersel...
We had decided (oh well, the xyl had decided) to clean up the woods where my antennas are intalled. The trees are 15 meters high, and housed a 4 x 40m horizontal loop, and several vertical phased loops for 15, 20 and 40. There is also a home brew full size 40m vertical.
Cleaning up meant take down some 20 trees completly and remove dead wood out of the others.
To make this possible, and help the 3-4 guys with their monstrous equipment do their destructive work I had to take all antennas down, with the exception of the 40m vertical, which they promised not to hurt.
After one week work we now had 20 trees less and a heap of wood which will take us 5 years to fire...
So all problems solved. 20 trees and quite some money out of the pocket, but the "mess" was cleaned. Time to drive to our winter residence in Spain, and forget all trouble and the bad weather.
And indeed, we have 25 degrees C, and no wind, perfect for vacation and more creative ham activities.
Tonite I talked to my son on jabber. He is taking care of the house and the cat. He told us yesterday's storm has taken out 15 trees, 6 of which are lying across the fence to the neighbours, and 2 are on top of the vertical. Which is now rather horizontal. At least I know what to do when we get home again. Looks like the spider beam, which I had taken down to storm (3m) hight is still alive. Time for a new antenna plan!!
You can't win them all....
20:50 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this