pa0r

Monday morning. We are in Benicasim, Spain, and it is raining. The temperature is still a nice 10 degrees plus, but it feels a lot colder than yesterday when we had sunshine.

We have been lucky with the weather until now on this trip. On saturday, the main roads in the south of France were closed because there was 20 cm of snow on the autoroute. To prevent such panic situations we had taken the western route through France to get here. Ultimate target for the journey is the Costa del Sol. But it is raining there as well, so we are not in a hurry to get there.

We started on the 18th, and took the route via Antwerp and Brussels. That way we circumvented the very bad roads through the walloon part of Belgium, and the route is flat so we save a lot of fuel. First stop was Soissons, just above Paris. The camp site was almost deserted and very quiet. We will come back there.It was bitter cold in Soissons, somewhere near the freezing point. But at least the sun was shining all day.

On thursday the 19th we made it through Paris to Pons, which is near Saintes, not far from the Atlantic coast. We know a camp site there which is run by a dutch couple. It had been raining quite a lot during the previous week so we got stuck in the mud and a helpful french guy with a pick-up truck proudly pulled us out and we parked the camper on the road.

Friday we took the 'route de 2 mers' to Sigean, just north of Perpignan. The camp site is well known amongst travellers to Spain. It is situated at the entrance of the 'Reserve Africaine', an animal park with thousands of african animals.

We visitited the park last year. This time we took a walk and had a glance at the zebras and oistriches from the ouside.

Sigean was sunny, and we stayed there for 3 days. This gave me the opportunity to put up the short wave antenna and get the email from the pskmail server in Stockholm. The server was workable all day from 9:00 untill 17:00 UTC.

On monday the 23rd we had a sunny drive to Sitges, just south of Barcelona. Sitges has a nice microclimate, with lots of sunny days. 3 of which we spent there. We could sit outside in the sun whilst the temperatures at home were going down, down.. Also in Sitges there was no problem at all reaching Per, SM0RWO's server to handle the email. The server was S7 with qsb to S4, sometimes the signal would disappear for a short time. But PSkmail handles all this without problems.

I tried the server of PA0N on 20, 40 and 80 meters, but it turned out there are constant hardware problems, and they are looking for new hardware for the server. It looks like the OMNI VI has been repaired. It had an intermittent contact in the PLL, probably a bad soldering joint. The TRX has been working for quite some time now and we keep the fingers crossed.

Thursday we drove down to Benicasim, our present location. Weather has been nice until today. Yesterday we had a walk down the phantastic beach, and enjoyed the sun. I also had some first test qso's with the client-to-client mode of the pskmail client with Paul, PA0N. We tried 40 and 30 meters, but ended up on 20. The test was succesfull. I have to tweak the timing a bit. Because of theintelligence built into the polling system the clients end up polling in sync, so everybody is transmitting at the same time. I tried to solve the problem but, I set poll time of one client to 10 + 5, and the other to 10 * 1.5 seconds which did not help obviously. I really should take more time for these things....

This morning I managed to get the list of email headers from SM0RWO, but that was it. I guess the power supply of the server needs a reset because the server had beaconed to the aprs-is ok. First time I used the wifi to get my email...

Yes, this modern camp site has Wifi, and I can use the internet from the camper. But you have to buy a card for 10 Euros per 120 minutes. At least I can now download the february issue of Scientific American from here.

Today it is raining. I think I will read a book.