PA7MDJ Amateur Radio Blog

February 26, 2017

Antarctica (IOTA AN-016)

Last edited: 04.03.2017

Map of Antarctica (source)

As most of you probably know, or otherwise will have noticed while tuning around on the HF bands, we're currently getting close to the minimum of Solar Cycle 24. This means HF propagation isn't optimal, and especially the higher bands are in bad shape and will remain so for the coming years until solar activity picks up again to start the climb towards the peak of the new solar cycle. You may have noticed that the 10m band is dead most of the time, and that even the 20m band does not deliver DX anymore as easily as it did a couple of years ago. For the ham operator with just a wire antenna and low power, the challenge has been raised to an even higher level. It's in times like these that one starts to appreciate CW even more; I'm rarely able to work DX in phone these days.

But life's too short to mourn the lack of sunspots! Forget the higher bands! Just tune into the 40m band, do your thing, and you might be in for a pleasant surprise! Even with a simple wire antenna and low power. I know many hams underestimate the possibilities of 40. Don't!

I've always been surprised by the DX I'm able to work on the 40m band (in CW, digimodes, and even SSB) with my HyEndFed multiband (10/20/40m) wire antenna and 100 Watts or less. This antenna basically works as a so called Zepp antenna or end fed dipole. Electrically on 40 metres the HyEndFed 10/20/40 is a half wave length. Physically it's much shorter though (about 12 metres). The trick is in a trap / loading coil at a distance of 10 metres in the antenna wire which on the 40m band lengthens the antenna electrically. Since 12 metres of wire is pretty much the maximum I can fit in my small garden, for me the HyEndFed 10/20/40 is the ideal 40m antenna. An inverted V dipole would be great, but the limited space available would mean the apex angle will be too small.
I used to have the HyEndFed in vertical position, dangling from a 12 metre telescopic fibreglass pole. But this was only a semi-permanent setup, as, even though the pole was guyed, as soon as the winds picked up, the pole had to be taken down. I now have the HyEndFed in a permanent sloper position from about 9 metres height at one end to about 1.5 metres height at the other, partly close to my house, and partly close to the ground. Not an ideal situation, but at least now I can get on HF anytime and independent of weather conditions. And, as far as I can tell, and much to my surprise, it's working just as well as the vertical configuration. At least it seems to be; I'm not able to do side by side comparison, so there might be difference in performance after all. Whatever may be the case, with the sloper configuration I still work plenty of DX.

From my QTH in the Netherlands with the HyEndFed on 40m especially the Caribbean region is a relatively easy target. But also eastern North America and parts of South America are worked quite regularly, and recently I've also been quite succesful in getting my signals on the African continent, making CW QSOs with DXpeditions in countries like Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic. With JT65 I once managed to make a 40m QSO with VK-land. Despite all these succeses, I never could have dreamed of one day working Antarctica on 40 though. But recently I did!

On January 27th, 2017 around 21:47 UTC on 7.018 MHz I heard the CW signal of RI1ANR. He was working simplex. As soon as possible I started keying the familiar Morse rhythm of my callsign, and much to my surprise quite quickly I heard my call coming back; signal reports were exchanged, a TU and a 73 and the QSO was in the log! And I'm still in shock! I worked Antarctica on 40m!

Contact with RI1ANR confirmed in LotW

RI1ANR is located at Novo Airbase, or Novo Runway, close to the Russian Novolazarevskaya Research Station in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. Novo Runway is a so called Blue Ice Runway where aircraft can land using wheels, i.e. their normal landing gear, instead of skis. During the austral summer there are regular flights from Cape Town to Novo Runway with the Ilyushin IL76 TD heavy-cargo aircraft. Novo Runway acts as a major Antarctic transport and logistics hub, and from there cargo and passengers are flown in to other parts of Antarctica and further inland.

Novo Blue Ice Runway (source)

Ilyushin 76 at Novo Runway (source)

Then on February 10th on 7.004 MHz around 01:15 UTC I again managed to work Antarctica. This time I worked RI1AND (op. Mikhail Fokin, RW1AI) at Novolazarevskaya Research Station itself. Again a simplex CW contact.

eQSL from RI1AND

Mikhail Fokin in the radio shack at Novolazarevskaya Station, Season 2016-2017 (source)

Mikhail Fokin at Novolazarevskaya Station, Season 2016-2017 (source)

Novolazarevskaya is a Russian base located at the Schirmacher Oasis in Queen Maud Land. It was opened in 1961 as part of the 6th Russian Antarctic Expedition. The population during summer is about 70. About 30 people winter over at the station. The inland ice sheet south of the station at a distance of 50 km already reaches a height of 1500 m.

Novolazarevskaya Station (source)

In the mean time recently on many nights I've also been hearing the 40m CW signals of LU4CJM/Z and LU1ZI from the Argentine Carlini Base on the South Shetland Islands, but unfortunately I have not been able to QSO them yet.

Then on February 17th I again put Antarctica in the log, again on 40m CW. I made a contact with KC4/N2TA which after some research I learned also is Mikhail Fokin at Novolazarevskaya using the callsign of the Brooklyn based Russian Speaking Radio Club International N2TA, with KC4 added for Antarctica. Fokin has been using this callsign before from Antarctica, for instance from Vostok Station in 2002, as shown by the QSL card below.

2002 QSL card from KC4/N2TA (source)

To me, Antarctica is the ultimate in DX. Historically, the isolated explorers, researchers, and base personell of The Great White Continent relied solely on radio communications and ham radio to stay in touch with eachother and with the outside world. I recommend reading this article in the Antarctic Sun about the "Madey Boys", two teenage brothers who with ham radio in the 1950s helped the US Navy men of "Operation Deep Freeze" in Antarctica stay in touch with their loved ones at home.
To me, working Antarctica is pure emotion! Already as an SWL in the 1980s and 1990s I especially enjoyed tuning in to signals coming from the Antarctic. I have particularly fond memories of listening to the ships and bases of the British Antarctic Survey on 9.106 MHz. I might get into that further in another blog entry.

The contacts on 40m weren't my first Antarctic QSOs. My first one was back in 2014 in JT65 on 10m with DP0GVN (op. Holger Bauer, DH1HB) at the German Neumayer Station III.
I had noticed this odd looking German callsign in my JT65 decodes, but hadn't payed much attention to it. At the time I was quite addicted to JT65, and while making contacts I kept track in near real time via Hamspots.net of where my signals were heard. At one point I noticed my signals had been picked up in Antarctica. And the station there that had spotted me was the one with the odd looking German callsign! A quick look on qrz.com taught me that the callsign belonged to the German Neumayer III Station. I quickly started attempts to make a QSO with DP0GVN, and I succeeded!

Screenshot of my JT65 contact with Neumayer Station

Neumayer Station III is located on the 200 m thick Ekström Ice Shelf, Queen Maud Land. The building is resting on hydraulic feet which during an annual lifting procedure lifts the building by about 80 to 100 cm to prevent it from sinking and eventually being buried in new snow.

QSL card from DP0GVN, Neumayer III Station

My second Antarctic contact was back in 2015 on 20m CW, also with Mikhail Fokin, the same operator whom I recently made a contact with on 40m. At the time Fokin was working out of the Russian Mirny Base with the callsign RI1ANT.

QSL card from RI1ANT, Mirny Base

Mirny Base is located in Queen Mary Land, East Antarctica. It was opened in 1956 by the 1st Russian Antarctic Expedition. The station hosts about 170 people in summer and 60 in winter. The average temperature is -11º C and on more than 200 days per year the wind is stronger than 15 m/sec.


Mirny Base (source)

Mikhail Fokin in the radio shack at Mirny Base, Season 2014-2015 (source)

Check out Mikhail Fokin's website at http://www.qsl.net/ua1ake/logs/.

Last but not least I'd like to mention the site of the Worldwide Antarctic Program at www.waponline.it. It's packed with information on 60 years of ham radio in Antarctica.

I will end this blog entry with the subject I started with: solar cycles. I can happily report that on December 20th, 2016 the first sunspot of Solar Cycle 25 was observed. This doesn't mean that cycle 24 and the minimum is over though. Usually solar cycles overlap up to 4 years. Read all about it here on the site of the Solar-Terrestrial Center of Excellence.


First sign of solar cycle 25 (source)

January 19, 2017

PH9HB/AM

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Here on www.dxcoffee.com, you can find an interesting interview with Jerry van der Goot, PH9HB. Beside being a passionate ham operator, Dutchman Jerry also is a Boeing 737NG captain for a carrier based at Amsterdam-Schiphol. During flights, when duties permit, he often can be found on the HF ham bands operating from the cockpit as PH9HB/AM using the aircraft's HF radio. "AM" stands for "Aeronautical Mobile" and is added to the radio amateur callsign when the operator is aboard an aircraft in flight. Just as "MM", or "Maritime Mobile", is added to the callsign when aboard a ship at sea.

It's always a thrill to work an /AM station. I've done it only once, with ON/GM7DIE/AM on 20m back in January 2014. I also managed to pick up Jerry's signals, but so far I've never had the pleasure and luck of making a 2-way contact with him. Jerry's /AM activities always attract a lot of attention, and getting through the pile-up isn't easy.

Jerry PH9HB (source)

PH9HB/AM take off (source)

As Jerry explains in the interview, the antenna used on the Boeing 737NG airplane is a so-called Shunt antenna. More information on this antenna type can be found here.

See also:

https://www.google.com/patents/US7511674
https://www.qrz.com/db/PH9HB

January 08, 2017

Meet Tom Christian

Last edited: 05.03.2017

Of all remote places on this planet, to me, one of the most fascinating and most intriguing has always been Pitcairn Island (IOTA OC-044). This tiny island in the southern Pacific Ocean has quite a remarkable history, and probably few places speak to the imagination as much as Pitcairn does. The island was settled in 1790 by the British mutineers of the HMS Bounty and the Polynesian men and women that accompanied them, an event retold in numerous books and films since, and therefore still well known today worldwide as the famous Mutiny on the Bounty.

Pitcairn forms the last remaining British Overseas Territory in the Pacific and actually is a group of four islands; Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie, and Oeno. Pitcairn Island, the second largest of the group, measuring about 4 km from west to east, is the only inhabited one. Adamstown, called after John Adams, one of the Bounty mutineers, is the capital and only settlement on the island. The entire population of Pitcairn lives in the capital and counts about 50. The HMS Bounty was set to fire by the mutineers and its wreckage still can be found today at the bottom of Pitcairn's Bounty Bay, where in 1957 it was discovered by an explorer of National Geographic. Pitcairn Island can only be reached by boat.

Tom Christian (1935-2013) (source)

Most of the residents of Pitcairn are descendants of the Bounty mutineers. So is Tom Christian (1935-2013). To the radio amateur community Tom was probably the most well known Pitcairn Islander, as he was a very active ham operator holding the callsign VR6TC and later VP6TC. Tom was the great-great-great-grandson of the leader of the Bounty mutineers, Fletcher Christian. Tom Christian also was the Chief Radio Officer of the official radio station on Pitcairn with callsign ZBP, and for a while also worked as a radio operator on a freighter ship. In 1952, at age 17, he got a training in Wellington, New Zealand to become radio telegraph operator. Tom's wife Betty Christian also holds a ham licence and was assigned the callsign VP6YL. Both Tom and Betty also regularly used ham radio to contact two of their four daughters, Jacqueline VK2CD and Raelene ZL2RAE, in Australia and New Zealand. Imagine what shortwave radio meant to the isolated Pitcairn Islanders before satellite communications and the internet found its way to the island. Unfortunately, OM Tom Christian in 2013, at the age of 77, became a Silent Key. In 1983 he was appointed the MBE - Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Tom Christian was one of the most sought after operators in ham radio ever.

QSL card from Tom Christian from the collection of Jeff Murray K1NSS. Photo courtesy of Jeff Murray.

My interest in Pitcairn was rekindled by a recent posting of Jeff, Murray K1NSS on the Facebook QSL Chasers group, and of course by the announcement of the upcoming VP6EU 2017 DXpedition to Pitcairn, which will take place from February 16th to March 5th, 2017!

Above you can see a photo of a QSL card from Tom Christian from the collection of Jeff Murray. It's lying on top of a copy of the book The Bounty Trilogy. Jeff did not contact Christian himself but found the QSL card in a collection he purchased at a local flea market. The card is a very interesting piece of ham radio history indeed, and definitely is a wonderful keepsake!

Tom Christian in his shack in 1988 (source)

My fascination for Pitcairn was born back in the 1980s when I was still a teenager and an avid shortwave listener. It was born from a small article in RAM - Radio Amateur Magazine written by Dutch journalist and top shortwave listener and DXer Michiel Schaay. Schaay had a column in the monthly RAM magazine with listening tips for SWLs. There was no internet at the time, and club bulletins and magazines like these were the only source of information in those days. Imagine how I was looking forward every month for the new issue of "the RAM" to appear at the newsstand. Schaay had picked up Tom Christian's transmissions from radio station ZBP a couple of times on 18.407 MHz with official radiotelephone traffic from Pitcairn to New Zealand. Needless to say that from then on I was monitoring this frequency whenever I could, unfortunately to no avail.

Article by Michiel Schaay in Radio Amateur Magazine nr. 104 of September 1989. If you look closely on the map on the southern part of the island you will find the location of the radio station.

Pitcairn is on top of my list of places I'd still very much like to make contact with one day. I'll have to depend on DXpeditions, as I believe there are no active hams left among the inhabitants of Pitcairn. It's going to be a tough one anyway, as for my "little pistol" station from the Netherlands, the Pacific always has been the most difficult part of the world to reach. But who knows, a couple of months ago I also managed to make a contact with Easter Island, which I also thought would be impossible to work. CW hopefully will do the trick someday. I'm not holding my breath though.

Addendum 05.03.2017
An interesting story dealing with the history of wireless stations on Pitcairn can be found here on the blog of Shortwave Central.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamstown,_Pitcairn_Islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Christian
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10253305/Tom-Christian.html
http://www.pitcairn2017.de/
http://www.qsl.net/oh2br/
https://theroguephotographer.smugmug.com/keyword/tom;christian

January 07, 2017

A package from Japan - Ultimate3S WSPR transmitter kit, a little project for the new year

Last edited: 08.01.2017

Just before the year's end I was surprised by the delivery of a small package from Japan. It turned out to be the Ultimate3S WSPR transmitter kit that I had ordered from QRP Labs. I was surprised that the package came from Japan, as I thought QRP Labs is a UK based company, and this is also where I expected the package to come from.

This will be a little project for the new year. The Ultimate3S is a standalone 250 mW WSPR transmitter not needing any PC to generate the WSPR signals. I've also ordered the GPS receiver kit with it, which will be used in conjunction with the U3S. I've purchased both a 20m and 40m plug-in Low Pass Filter, but my main focus will be on the 40m band. I'm planning on building a 40m band C-Pole wire antenna and put it up in sloping configuration to use together with the U3S. It's all highly experimental, and I'd also like to see if this antenna can improve the reception on 40m of SOTA CW stations within Europe. With the often extremely weak QRP signals of SOTA activators, even the slightest improvement is very welcome.

See also my blog entry about the use of the U3S in High Altitude Balloon payloads.

Stay tuned!

January 01, 2017

Various QSL cards

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Here's the QSL card received recently for my contact with the F8UFT expedition to the Mont Blanc! It's one of my most prized QSL cards! Many thanks to Gérald F6HBI. For more information on the expedition, also see my blog entries of December 11th and November 12th.

This is the most recent batch of bureau cards for PD7MDJ / PA7MDJ. Picked up at the local VERON club station on 16.12.2016. Lots of cards received via Global QSL this time, including quite a few for my SOTA contacts with HB9CBR/P.

December 25, 2016

Worked All States Award

Last edited: 26.12.2016

This arrived a few days ago, just in time for Christmas; my Worked All States certificate! Mighty proud! Earned for working all 50 states of the USA, including Alaska and Hawaii. Working them is one thing, getting them all confirmed in LotW is another. In the spring of 2015 I worked Hawaii, and with that already unofficially completed my WAS. Oregon was a tough nut to crack though QSL-wise. But a couple of weeks ago a long-awaited LotW QSL came in for Oregon, and I finally had all 50 states confirmed, eventually resulting in the certificate shown here!
All states are confirmed in SSB and/or CW, except for North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, which are confirmed only in digital modes JT65 or JT9.

December 11, 2016

Mont Blanc SOTA F/AB-001 - Part 2

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In addition to my blog entry of November 12th, Mont Blanc SOTA F/AB-001, here's some more information from Gérald F6HBI. The photos below are taken with his kind permission from Gérald's Flickr pages. More photos can be found on the Flickr pages listed at the end of this blog entry.

Gérald wrote to me that indeed the F8UFT team for August 16th had planned to climb and activate Mont Blanc du Tacul SOTA F/AB-003 and Aguille du Midi F/AB-015 on returning, but the glacier of Mont Blanc du Tacul had dropped down and in its disastrous path killed three people, which made the F8UFT team decide it was better to cancel the climb and do a training session somewhere else.
For the SOTA chaser following the expedition from his "arm chair" and the comfort of his home, with the scenic picture postcards of the area in mind, it's easy to forget how hostile and dangerous the mountains can be. In the time the F8UFT team was there, in the area no less than 10 people have lost their lives in the mountains. Another OM that also wanted to climb and activate the Mont Blanc got stuck in a cable car at 3640 metres height and had to spend the night in there. The ordeal of OM F5OUX even got coverage on the TV news.

The breathtaking video of the F8UFT team descending the Aguille du Midi can now be found here, and definitely is a MUST-WATCH:

An expedition video and QSL cards are still in the making. I'll keep you posted.

Articles on the F8UFT Mont Blanc expedition also appeared in La Pioche (the news bulletin of the UFT - Union Française des Télégraphistes) issue nr. 121 4/2016, and Radio-REF (the news bulletin of the REF - Réseau des Émetteurs Français) issue nr. 903 November 2016.

Many thanks to Gérald, F6HBI for the information. Merci beaucoup, Gérald!

André, F6IGY with his VHF looking at the Mont Blanc summit.


The UFT flag and the two CW stations on the summit of the Mont Blanc. Frédéric, F8DQY on 40m in the back. Gérald, F6HBI on 30m in the front.

Gérald, F6HBI at the key at 4,810 m height on the summit of the Mont Blanc.

The F8UFT team arriving on the summit of Mont Buet. The Mont Blanc can be seen in the background at the right.

Cover of Radio-REF issue nr. 903