pa0r

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....

Thursday,  November 30. .

7:30 Breakfast. We have been packing last night and the truck which will take our bagage to the airport will come 8:30, Insh Allah.... We will get our passports back at the hotel desk when we return the key to our room. The bus will pick us up around 9:00.

8:00 I have my passport, with a nice visum and plenty of stamps. Nothing can stop us from going home now.

8:30 No truck...

9:00 No truck, no bus. We wait outside,the weather is sunny again.

10:30 The bus arrives and we have to pack all stuff in the bus as the truck won't come.

11:15 We arrive at the airport. We unload the bus and find enough bagage carts to wheel everything into the departure hall. First bagage check, everything goes through the Xray scanner.

11:35 We put all stuff together in the arrival hall. Andy collects all tickets to check us in as a group, as we would completely block the check in counter.... We wait. The plane is leaving 14:10, so we have plenty of time. I am starting to get hungry, but where we are there is nothing we can buy. We change our money back into Euros.

11:50 We get our boarding tickets. Lufthansa opens a special counter for the bagage and it works out fine...

12:00 The bagage is on its way to the plane. We gather our hand luggage and proceed to customs for a passport check. We merge into the queue.

12:10 Mitch,VE6OH shows his passport. The customs officer looks at it, and types the name into a terminal. He tells Mitch to "wait a few minutes" and puts the passport aside. Mitch looks irritated and waits.

12:15 It is my turn. Mitch is still waiting a few minutes. The guy types my name into the terminal and says: "wait a few minutes" and puts my passport aside. I wait too.

12:20 Adriano, ON5GA joins us.

12:26 Franz, DK1II joins us. We now form an awkward block for the queue. The other expedition members have taken the other queue and wave at us. "We won't leave without you", Andy jokes. Mustapha tells us it is probably our own fault, we should not have harassed the customs people. I am not aware of any harassment. The customs guy asks us to sit down but there are no chairs.

12:45 I ask the guy what happens. He says something like "name check". Obviously he does not speak any language other than arabic. Meanwhile 4 seats are empty and we sit down and wait.

13:40 First call to board the plane to Frankfurt. We try to talk to the customs guys but nobody will tell us anything. We don't know what is wrong. We need an interpreter but nobody there who can help us. This is getting scary. We have no passport, and any policeman can put us in jail for that. Adriano has a connecting flight in Frankfurt and his bagage is checked through to Brussels. We don't fancy spending another day in Libia, and certainly not in this airport.

13:55 Last call for the plane to Frankfurt. We try to communicate with anybody in customs, but we have no luck. Haytem, an operator of the 5A1A club station appears. He talks arabic to customs and into his phone. He tells us to be patient.

14:10 We don't know if the plane has left. Haytem has disappeared again. Nobody tells us anything. We wait, there is nothing else we can do. If the plane leaves without us I will have to call home that I won't come and they will be scared too.

14:25 The Lufthansa station manager appears. He is on the phone to someone and tells us that the plane is still there, but it will not wait longer than 20 minutes after scheduled departure. And no, they won't have to unload the bagage as we havechecked in as a group.

14:35 We get thumbs up... The station manager tells us that somebody has given the green light for us to leave.

He explains that if your name is on a certain list, the terminal will go yellow when the guy types your name. And then there is endless checking and phoning, and we are lucky someone has given a green light.

14:40 I am the last one to get my passport stamped. We run to the Xray machine. Franz is still there, he has a radio in his hand luggage. My 2 laptops get through without problems. We run to gate 7. The door of the plane closes behind us.

14:45 The plane starts moving, we made it out....

We still don't know what happened. There was no explanation, and no apoligies. The secret service has had our names month ahead of the expedition.They have followed our steps metaculously during our stay. They have reported our every move during our operation. So why this 'monkey theatre'? I think Lybia is just not there yet, and despite all friendly speeches about peace and friendship ("you are always welcome here") I won't come back until the country is civilized. In other words, to me Lybia still sucks...

Tuesday 28, 8:30. We just broke the 100.000 qso barrier. Yuki is on 20 meters SSB for JA and Andy,DJ7IK is working some US stations on 80 SSB.

The crew will start dismantling most of the antennas today, and we will go on running with 3 stations until tomorrow morning. Weather has gone worse. We had to close down the station temporarily because of thunderstorms last night. And the next days are supposed to be rainy, just in time for the antenna work outside.

Meanwhile I will be checking the contest log and uploading the rest of the 100k qso's to the online log. Yesterday's batch (some 36.000 q's) did not make in into the online log, so we try again this morning.

 After switching back to the free dxpedition version of Win-test I am back into the routine of restarting programs on the various computers. This version of Win-test is crap. I don't understand how the authors of the program could release it in this state. (I will report on our experience with Win-test separately).

I hope we will get our passports back which were taken away from us when we got into the country....

Well, it is done, finito!! We more than reached our goals in the contest, being 40 Million points. We have 17000 qso's in the contest log and a raw score of 46 Million!!! We will have to wait a bit to find out if it is enough for a first place in the M/M category.

It is rather quiet in the main shack. Most of the crew are on a trip to Tripolis. Yuki is running Japanese stations on 20 SSB like a machine gun.Andy, DL9USA is on 17 CW and Ruth IT9ESZ and Adriano, ON5GA are heating up 40m SSB.
The going qso rate is over 400.

We still need some 9500 qso's until we reach the 100k qso goal for the expedition, and it looks like we are going to make it.

Back to log checking...

It is sunday, November 26 and we have 16 hours to go in the contest. The network is running stable, and with the exception of restarting a logging program here and there everything works as planned. What a relief! After the

The pile-ups on 15 are incredible. We are working simplex but the pile-up is 1 kHz wide. It is impossible to grab more than a few letters from a callsign. And once you have it complete you have to give the report 3 times since the station will not hear you are giving it. This slows the rate down to about 100 - 150 per hour.

Oh well, lets call it a luxury problem... 15 will be open until 19:00 Z, lets go again.... CU on 15.....