pa0r

We are moving back from our winter residence in Spain to the home base
in the Netherlands. At this time of the year we are moving from camp
site to campsite, as we need electricity for the heating. We use the gas
only for cooking, and although the size and shape of bananas is strictly
regulated within the European Community, they have not been able to
standardize the GAS BOTTLE. That means we take 2 full 11 kg bottles with
us from Holland, and they have to last until we come back.
First thing I do as soon as the electricity is connected to the camper
is to put up the "email antenna". It consists of a telescoping carbon
fishing rod and 10 meters of wire. About 7 meters of wire is wound very
loosely around the extended fishing rod, which is then put on 20 cm of
steel pipe. The rest of the wire is pulled to the front of the camper,
making it sort of an inverted L antenna. Inside, the wire is tuned with
a manual T-filter tuner.
While we were still in Benicassim, 2500 km from the server, I could
connect to the internet all through the day on 30 meters with S6/7
signals, it stopped abruptly at 22:00 UTC. The connections were
characterized by deep QSB, caused by multipath propagation. Of course
pskmail handles qsb easily, but it does slow down the data transfer as
blocks hit by qsb under the noise level have to be repeated, and block
size is automatically reduced so overhead is increased...
Here in a camp site north of Limoges, (must be a distance of some 1600
km from Stockholm), there is no sign of multipath. The server is a
stable S8/9, just like a ground wave connection. And this is 20:00 UTC.
It really is great fun to see block size going up to 64
characters/block. And also to work through the pactor traffic which
takes place on this frequency although we are in qso.
I cannot check the mid day conditions, as we are driving during that
time. I get the mail during breakfast, or while running for the fresh
bread in the morning, and I send the new posit after we arrive at the
next location.
Within 2 days we will be home, and I can start working on the servers
again through the remote connections via the internet... should think
about ssh via pskmail...