[SEDXC] Fwd: T32C Bulletin 7

[BLamboley at aol.com]

FYI - A great opration!
 
 
  
____________________________________
 From: don.field at gmail.com
To: g3xtt at lineone.net
Sent: 11 Oct 4 Tue  21:05:35 Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: T32C Bulletin 7


We have now been operating for four days and have passed the 50,000 QSO  
milestone. There is still almost 3 weeks to go, so those who are still needing 
 us on various bands and modes have many opportunities still to come. This  
bulletin is by way of a summary of what has been done and what is  planned.
 
Bear in mind that this has turned out to be something of an unplanned  
Field Day style operation, and we now have no expectations of our container of  
equipment arriving while we are here on Christmas Island. Instead, the team  
hand carried just over one metric tonne of equipment (poles, cables, radio  
gear, computers, etc) to the island. We are extremely grateful to all those 
 who loaned equipment at short notice to help enable the expedition to take 
 place and be successful. Inevitably we have had teething problems, as we 
have  a variety of amplifiers, Microham routers, etc. where we would, 
ideally, like  to have standard equipment and interfaces. Fortunately the 
transceivers are  consistent as Yaesu came to our rescue with the loan of ten FT-450D 
radios at  very short notice.
 
Antenna-wise, we have two-element vertical dipole arrays by the sea for  20 
through 10, quarter-wave verticals with elevated radials for 30 and 40, a  
quarter wave vertical with ground radials for 80 and a 15m high T antenna 
with  ground radials for 160. We also have two Beverage receive antennas for 
160 and  now have additional vertical dipoles for 10, 15 and 20 to allow us  
to retask the low band stations as second stations on those bands  when LF 
is closed. We are continually refining our antenna systems within the  limits 
of the wire, poles and coax that we have here, though the second  tranche 
of operators who arrive in a week's time will bring more. 
 
We started our SSB operations at the weekend with an entry in the Oceania  
SSB contest in which we believe we have comprehensively beaten the previous  
contest records. We will not, however, be entering the CW leg as this would 
 undoubtedly lead to a lot of unnecessary duplicate contacts as we will by 
then  have been very active on CW on all bands.
 
There has been high demand for Christmas Island, especially on LF and  also 
on 10 and 12 where, for many years, there has been little or no  
propagation. So far the sunspots have been helping those bands along, with 10m  being 
our QSO leader to date. We have pretty much been working all comers  to 
clear the decks so that we can begin to focus more on Europe where band  
openings are much more limited than to the US and Japan. We would appreciate  
cooperation from those two areas - US and Japanese stations should find plenty  
of opportunity to work us on all bands. We did have to delay starting our 
RTTY  operations - our original plans would have allowed us to be on RTTY right 
from  the start. The good news is that RTTY is now well under way on 
several bands.  If 10m continues to play well, we may even show up on FM!
 
On 160, we made our first European contacts last night, Italy and Germany  
and at our sunset and Russia, Ukraine and Finland at our sunrise. Hopefully  
these openings will improve over the next week or two. 80m shows a similar  
pattern but with longer openings, but right now only our topband station 
has  access to the Beverages.
 
We will continue to make regular updates on our website and Michael G7VJR  
will no doubt update Twitter while he is here (he leaves with the first 
group  next week). The online log on ClubLog is getting a very high hit rate, as 
 expected - we are uploading logs twice a day, at 7am and 7pm local time 
here.  The Internet connectivity from the hotel is turning out to be better 
than we  had anticipated (since our site visit a year ago the hotel has 
installed a  satellite Internet), and not only does this make log uploading easier 
but has  meant that we have been able to follow everyone's feedback better 
than  expected - we are grateful for that and it feeds into our daily team 
meetings.  There is a feedback facility on the _t32c.com_ (http://t32c.com/)  
website, which is the best way to reach  us.
 
Finally, for that small but enthusiastic group of 6m EMEers, we are still  
hoping to give this mode a go in the second two weeks of the expedition, but 
 cannot at this time make any guarantees.
 
Don G3XTT
T32C Publicity Officer